Desktop

A window with the whole timetable in it.

The same offline planner as the phone, as a native application for Linux, macOS and Windows. The Swiss timetable is downloaded once into the app and lives on the machine — every search after that is answered there, with no connection and no account.

Install

Three shapes on the downloads page, with checksums: an archive to unpack and run on Linux, a disk image on macOS, and an installer for your own account on Windows. Neither the macOS image nor the Windows installer is signed by a paid certificate, so each warns you once on the very first launch — the downloads page says exactly which click gets past it.

Open Timetables once and download a year. That file is a few hundred megabytes and is the whole of Switzerland; everything else on this page works without a connection from then on. The Windows installer also comes in a variant with the timetable already inside it, for a machine that will never be online.

Type into From and To and the list underneath offers stations first, and addresses under them where no station answers to what you typed — a hospital, a street, a hamlet. A coordinate pasted in as 47.4979, 8.7241 is taken as one. Addresses need the gazetteer, an optional one-time download of every official Swiss address and place name, offered in Timetables, beside the timetable itself.

When an end of the journey is a place rather than a station, the walk to the stop and the walk from it are part of the answer: the card reads door to door, and the times inside it are still the ones the platform clock will agree with. Every connection can also be drawn — the two walks and every stop on the way, on the ground they cover, out of the same file and with no map service behind it.

A day out, not just a journey

The Day out section plans several places in one day: where it starts, where it ends, and any number of places in between, each with as long as you want to stay there. A stay can also be given as a time of day — leave after nine lands on the next nine there is, which is how one field asks for a night away. Any of those places may be an address, and a stop the train already calls at gives you that train rather than an invented change.

Saving one, and following it

Save a connection and it waits in Saved; press Follow and Active counts down to it. Saving and following are two different things on purpose: a journey saved for next week cannot take the countdown away from the one you are on.

On a journey that starts at a front door, that countdown is about the moment you have to leave rather than the moment the train goes. A train five minutes off from a platform twelve minutes’ walk away has already been missed, and a screen counting to the train would say otherwise right up until it was too late. A saved journey keeps its walks, so the number survives closing the app and a timetable being replaced underneath it.

What else is in the window

Live delays where the operators publish them, and the plain plan where they do not, said as such. The carriage layout for many trains, so you wait at the right end of the platform rather than along it. A pace setting that offers the tighter changes when you are quick on your feet — often a train earlier. A departure board around any station, where a click on a row plans from it. Sharing, as a link or as a picture drawn on this machine. And every section has a number, which the Go menu shows you; the window comes back where you left it, on the screen you left it on.

Where your data lives

Everything stays on your machine: the timetable, the optional gazetteer, your saved journeys and your settings, in your account’s own data directory. Searches run locally against them. The app reaches the network only for the things you ask it to — a timetable, the gazetteer, live delays, a carriage formation — and never to answer a search. There is no account to make and nothing to buy.