Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Working from home, but missing the voice of Elinor Hamilton telling you all services are canceled?

Great news for transport nerds! It is now possible to recreate the desolation of an empty platform with every train delayed or canceled, thanks to an unnervingly accurate replica of a station departure board.

The units come from UK Departure Boards and were sent to The Register after we gave Govia Thameslink Railway a gentle ribbing over some issues afflicting the signage at Brighton Station.

The hardware consists of panels refreshed with data pulled from various APIs published by transport organizations. Along with trains, the boards can be set to show bus and tram arrivals, as well as tube and heritage railway information. This is collated and transmitted via Wi-Fi to be displayed in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

There are three panels on offer: a tiny desktop version with an OLED panel that will only display in one color (so choose carefully), a version with LEDs – the Classic – that measures about 60cm across, and a behemoth – the Pro – a full meter in width.

All are slightly different. The Desktop, while only being able to show one color, features a clock and internal speaker. The Classic does not have the same clock but will show three lines of text in different colors and also has an internal speaker. The Pro is a scaled-up version of the Classic but lacks an internal speaker (although UK Departure Boards assured us that an updated version was on the way).

And you'll need that speaker if you want to hear the dulcet tones of Elinor Hamilton or Matthew Streeton telling you when the trains or tubes are due to arrive or apologizing when the inevitable delays occur.

Setting up the boards is simple. The devices need to be connected to Wi-Fi and a power source; there are no batteries here. After configuration via an account with UK Departure Boards, they will show departures based on the user's selection.

The Classic board has a smooth acrylic panel on top of the LEDs, which is a bit reflective (as you can see in the image), while the Pro does not. UK Departure Boards told us that future versions of the Pro board would also come with a panel to protect the LEDs and add to the whole OEM-network-rail vibe, but were considering offering a version without for users concerned about glare.

Both Desktop and Classic will run on a micro USB connection, while the larger Pro needs its own power supply, although an extension cable is included. None of the units are suitable for outdoor use.

The boards themselves run from an AWS service. UK Departure Boards collates the various UK transport APIs out there (freight services are due to go into testing shortly) and sends what the user has chosen to see (in our case, trains from our local station) as a JSON response in response to polling from the board.

The basic service is free once you've bought the board. There are premium options with more settings and services, and you'll need a premium service if you decide to purchase the voice packs for Hamilton or Streeton.

As with any service that depends on a cloud, we had to ask what would happen if UK Departure Boards were to disappear. Would purchasers end up with a dumb board forever trying to contact the mothership?

A spokesperson said: "We don't plan on going anywhere but if we were to close shop we would most likely just move all the server processing scripts onto the boards themselves. And as long as there are no API changes they should continue to run just fine. Users at that point could play around with the system if they wanted it.

"One of the main reasons it lives on our server and not the board at the moment is to protect our IP. An awful lot of work has gone into all the feed interactions, board processing scripts, and database data, and it's something we certainly would not want anyone getting hold of."

The boards are not cheap, starting at £184.99 ($248) for the desktop version and going to £384.99 ($515) for the Pro. You could also roll your own – most of the APIs are publicly available with no charge, although Transport for London's data was offline at the time of writing due to a "cyber incident."

But if you don't have the time, inclination, or skills to build one yourself, the boards are undoubtedly neat, easy to set up, and surprisingly appealing. This writer's partner, who has less than zero interest in transport infrastructure, declared them "the coolest thing ever."

And you know what? They really are. ®