Could come in handy (Picture: Tubemoji)

Ever found yourself on a tube platform where the signs are displaying no useful information at all?

You might enjoy this new map showing where every London Underground train is at once.

Using publicly available data from TfL, the Tubemoji map shows each train make its way from station to station, so you can work out how long you’re likely to have to wait.

‘I wanted to solve a problem every Londoner’s experienced,’ programmer Jack Dearlove told Metro.co.uk.


‘You’re standing waiting for a Circle Line train and the departure board only shows District Line trains. You have no idea how long you’re going to be stuck there because you don’t know where the tube train is.’



‘The feature took me about six months to build and uses a mix of data from TfL and a prediction algorithm to calculate each train’s location.

The map uses public data available from TfL (Picture: Getty)

‘I’ve spent a lot of time standing on the platform at Turnpike Lane waiting for trains to come in to test it!

‘It works best on Tube lines where TfL’s signals are the newest. So the Victoria Line and and Jubilee Lines are pretty spot on, while the parts of the Tube around High Street Kensington and between Edgware Road and Hammersmith can be a little more hit and miss.

‘There was a lot of trial and error tweaking the algorithm to take into account the average speed of trains and the time delay in getting the data from TfL.’

Jack explained how he did it Jack testing out the app (Picture: Jack Dearlove) TfL doesn’t hand the location of every Tube train to you on a plate. I built it by taking the data they release for station departure boards and doing a lot of maths. Sadly, even the data they do give you is a bit of a mess. The feeds are full of random rogue capital letters, Circle Line trains are marked as Hammersmith & City Line trains as they travel along the Embankment (presumably a hangover from before the Circle Line was ‘un-circled’), trains don’t have a simple unique identifier, some lines double up, others don’t, and the ancient signals controlling any train that goes near Edgware Road make plotting large parts of the network almost impossible. Still, I soldiered on, often plotting data points by hand. I wanted to give people the experience looking at their phones and seeing a train appear out of a tunnel at the exact same time it arrived on the map. And since TfL’s arrivals data was pretty delayed, I also had to devise a simple algorithm to counteract it all.

Jack is one of several developers to make use of the data, which TfL made public in 2010, and says he is the first to put it in an app.

Another map doing something similar is traintimes.org.uk, which aims to show trains in real time as they travel along the underground network.

The app Tubemoji also updates users on the status of each tube line, using emojis to show how well it is performing.

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