David Coombe's UK Rail Disruptions is a useful app for anyone who regularly travels by train in the UK; it provides easy access to information about disruptions occurring across the UK railway network. The app includes an option to specify a list of stations for which you want to be notified about when a disruption occurs.

The app shows information about disruptions (e.g. location and delay) and also provides information about what has caused the disruptions (e.g. signal failure, elephant on the line, wrong type of snow). If you opt to specify alert stations any disruptions for these stations will be highlighted on the apps opening page, and, if you've pinned the app to the Start screen (and turned on notifications in the app's settings) the app's Live Tile will change colour, alerting you to disruptions that might impact on your journey.

The information that the app provides is readily accessible on the web and is available in other Windows Phone apps, but the elegant simplicity of UK Rail Disruption is a good example of how less can be more and how, for standardised information retrieval, even a simple native app can offer a superior user experience to the mobile web. In particular, it is well suited to commuters who travel the same route each day, and are therefore familiar with the schedule and routing, but who still want to be alerted to any potential disruptions to their journey.

Windows Phone Store description:

UK Rail Disruptions gives detailed information about all current rail disruptions. You can select stations that are of interest to you and get alerts when disruptions occur.

Complete with a background agent you will automatically be notified about any disruptions at your stations.

UK Rail Disruptions, which is only available for Windows Phone 8, is a free download from the Windows Phone Store.