If I understand your question and comments correctly, you want to customize your journey on the basis of stopping off at places of interest along the way.
I think the easiest way to do this would be by looking at the UK rail map. There are a lot of lines, but not so many it’s hard to follow. This map has all stations and is laid out as a technical rather than geographic diagram so is easy to read.
If you look at Thurso and your intention is to go south through Scotland, you can easily see that you can change at Inverness and go via the east coast line or the inland line.
However it depends what you want to optimize by. If you want to optimize for interesting places, then the map is all you need. If you want to optimize for cost you’re better using a specialist engine like TrainSplit.
On my travels across Europe I always use the Rail Planner app.
It is mainly for use with Interrail tickets, but two features are really useful for “normal” train travels as well:
- Find train stations near your current position.
- Look up departure and arrival information for every station.
The best part of the app is that it’s almost entirely offline (data needed for Google Maps integration), and with regular updates for any changes.
If you’re happy to search for trains for a single day at a time, you can use http://www.brtimes.com/. Enter the departure station, leave “only trains calling at” blank, and select a date, and it will show you all trains timetabled to depart from that station.
The site says:
Information is updated nightly from data feeds provided by Network Rail, except for details of station connection times, train schedules for Ireland (North & South) and some bus and ferry schedules, which are updated weekly from data feeds provided by ATOC.
so it should be reliable.
You can look at the departures or arrivals for any station on the UK rail network on the National Rail website.
For example Glasgow Central Departures and Glasgow Central Arrivals. You can choose to add a second station to the search if you want to see only arrivals at a given station from a certain station.
If you want a more manual option there are also links on the same website to the Electronic National Rail Timetable (hosted on the Network Rail website). This gives you the long term schedual for every station, similar to what you would find printed out on the platform. Similar timetables are provided by the operators of the stations or networks that server the stations.
Continuing the example, Glasgow Central is on timetable 225 and 226.
I suggest Rome2Rio which’ll list trains and connections, but also give you options for flights, ferries, buses and taxis depending what is appropriate for the route you are travelling. I can’t guarantee the cost accuracy, but it is a good first tool to look at.
Example Dingwall to Inverness https://www.rome2rio.com/s/Dingwall/Inverness
Example Thurso to Fair Isle https://www.rome2rio.com/s/Thurso/Fair-Isle
Clicking on the train option for example will give you schedule information and links to scotrail, while the bus option links to the different schedule websites. Once you find which bus and train companies serve the town, you can then use those links to see all routes out from a given town. So for Dingwall for example, you can click on the scotrail link for trains and Stagecoach, D&E Coaches and Westerbus links for buses so you can see all their routes.
To get more trains to or from a station, click on “Explore” in the top right corner. There you will get additional connections from your “to” and “from” locations. For example for Thurso there are the local Scottish towns, but also ones such as Thurso to Penzance (Cornwall) and even Gdansk!
Google maps typically shows a “departure board” for each rail station.
For the specific example you quote in a comment (Thurso) since this is basically a single line service the downloadable timetable for the line available from the rail operator’s site
is useful. Obviously this does not work well for stations which serve many destinations like Birmingham New Street. For that the Austrian site mention by @martin in his answer is much better.
While not an official source the Wikipedia page for most train stations in the UK has a section labeled services, which give an overview of the trains from a station. Example for Kyle of Lochalsh:
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_of_Lochalsh_railway_station)
Always be sure to check against an official source before traveling. If your having trouble finding the nearest station you could consider using one of these maps of the network:
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/maps.aspx
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
Also, if you know the date you’ll be traveling real time trains is capable of showing all departures from a station on a given day, example for Kyle of Lochalsh: http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/advanced/KYL/2018/02/13/0000-2359?stp=WVS&show=pax-calls&order=wtt
You could also consider posting a more specific question with the island you are actually trying to reach.
You can use ÖBB’s site also for stations outside of Austria to see departures and arrivals. Just enter the station you are interested in and click on Display Information, then on Departures (or Arrivals) and under Settings you can change the date (and some other things, such as type of train).
As always there is the caveat that HAFAS might not know about some regional trains (the same problem as if you use bahn.de to plan journeys) but this should be better than nothing.
National rail will list routes from A to B for all trains in the UK
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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