About this site
Who makes Manchester Metrolink, where the data comes from, and what we refuse to publish.
What this is
Manchester Metrolink is an independent guide to the Manchester tram network. It is not run by Metrolink, not run by Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), and has no connection with either. Nothing here is official; everything here is traceable.
The site exists because the published information about Metrolink is oddly hard to use. The operator has the authoritative data and publishes it properly, as open data — but its own website is built for people standing at a stop with a phone, not for someone planning a journey, comparing two routes or trying to find out how long a trip actually takes. And a surprising amount of what is written about Metrolink elsewhere is simply out of date.
How the data is built
Every page on this site is generated from two open datasets, and nothing is typed in by hand.
The timetable is the Traveline National Dataset, the operator’s own registered timetable in TransXChange format, published under the Open Government Licence. The run in force at the time of writing contains 5,194 tram journeys. The stop list and the coordinates come from NaPTAN, the Department for Transport’s national stop register.
Three things are worth knowing about how that was handled, because they are the difference between a site that is right and one that looks right.
The stop list went through three sources, not two. The usual check is to agree the timetable against the stop register — except those two are not independent: the timetable copies its stop names straight out of NaPTAN, so a perfect match proves nothing about the names. It does prove that no stop is missing and none is closed, which matters. For the set of stops itself we checked a third, unrelated published list. All three agree on the same 99 stops.
Two stops in the register are genuinely gone. Mosley Street and Woodlands Road both appear in NaPTAN and are served by no tram. A stop that should exist and does not looks exactly like a parsing bug, so both were checked outside the data before being written off: Mosley Street closed in 2013 when the Piccadilly axis was rebuilt, and Woodlands Road closed on 16 December 2013, replaced by Queens Road and Abraham Moss.
The frequency everyone quotes is wrong. Metrolink is described almost everywhere as running every 12 minutes. The registered timetable says every 15, and has since the cut in March 2026. We publish what the timetable says, with the date it came into force, which is why this site occasionally disagrees with better-known ones.
What this site leaves out, on purpose
Fares. We do not quote a single price. The operator’s ticket pages are closed to automated reading, and the third-party guides that do quote prices contradict one another — we found £1.40 and £1.70 given for the same one-zone single. A wrong price sends somebody to a platform with the wrong money, which is worse than no price at all. The tickets page explains how the system works and sends you to the operator for the numbers.
Live running. TfGM publishes a real-time feed and we do not yet hold a key for it, so this site shows the published timetable and says so on every page. Nothing here is labelled “live”, because nothing here is.
Fare zones on the map. Metrolink prices by zone, and “Metrolink zone map” is a common search. We do not draw the zones because we cannot read them from a source we trust.
How it pays for itself
The site carries advertising. That is the whole business model: there is nothing to buy here, no newsletter, no app, and no affiliate links to ticket resellers. Advertising does not decide what goes on the pages — which is easy to say and easy to check, because the thing we could most obviously monetise, ticket prices, is the thing we refuse to publish.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed. Data errors are corrected at the source and the pages are regenerated, so a fix to one stop fixes it everywhere it appears rather than in the one place you spotted it. Write to [email protected].
Tram times on this page come from the Traveline National Dataset (TransXChange, Open Government Licence v3.0); stop names and coordinates from NaPTAN, the Department for Transport stop register. Manchester Metrolink is an independent guide: it is not run by Metrolink or Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) and has no connection with either. Check tfgm.com before you travel.