An elevated Metro Manila rail line curving through the city at dusk

Relaunch in progress

Make your commute easier

TrainsPh turned thousands of Metro Manila commuters into each other's early warning system: live station CCTV, crowd reports, fares and rail news for LRT‑1, LRT‑2, MRT‑3 and PNR. We are building the next one.

Get notified at relaunch See what it did
  • LRT-1
  • LRT-2
  • MRT-3
  • PNR

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About

A commuting app built
by the people stuck in the queue

Nobody publishes how long the line at Doroteo Jose is right now. The commuters standing in it did, and we are building the version that does it again, better.

TrainsPh is a crowdsourcing project for Metro Manila's rail network. The idea has not changed since the first version: commuters report what they are actually seeing, how packed a station is, whether a line has stalled, which platform is moving, and everyone else gets it in seconds.

The more people who tap the rating bar, the sharper the picture becomes for the next person.

Around that sits everything you would otherwise open four apps to find: live CCTV of ticketing areas and platforms, push alerts for rail news, your distance from every station on the line, fare and travel-time estimates for both Single Journey and Stored Value tickets, and a chat where commuters warn each other before committing to a queue.

The first version shipped in 2017 and reached thousands of daily commuters before it came off the store. The next one is in build, for a rail network that has grown a great deal since, and for the same people standing on the same platforms.

CCTV footage of train stations is provided by the Department of Transportation. TrainsPh is a voluntary, non-government project that exists to support Metro Manila commuters.

Crowdsourced

Accuracy comes from volume. Every rating a commuter submits sharpens the congestion score for the next one.

Real-time

Congestion, chat and news alerts land as they happen, not on the next scheduled refresh.

Free and independent

No fare, no agency. A volunteer project that leans on public data and the people who use it.

Lightweight

Conservative on data and memory, because it has to work on the phone you already have, on the signal you already have.

Features

What it did for the people
who ride every day

Six things the first version got right, on the screens commuters actually used. Every one of them carries into the rebuild. This is the floor, not the ceiling.

The Train News screen listing official DOTC-MRT3 service advisories

Stay ahead

Train news & alerts

Official advisories and the operators' own feeds landed in one timeline, with push alerts behind them. Commuters found out a line was suspended before they left the house, not after queuing at the turnstile.

The station list for LRT-1 showing the distance from the user to each station

Orientation

Station proximity

Every station on the line, ranked by distance from where you stood. It turned “which entrance?” from a guess into a glance, and made the network navigable for people who did not grow up on it.

Live CCTV tiles of the northbound ticketing area and platform at Santolan-Anapolis station

See it yourself

Live station CCTV

Ticketing areas and platforms, northbound and southbound, straight from the Department of Transportation's cameras. For the first time a commuter could see the queue before committing an hour to it. The feeds were later taken down, and this is the one feature we cannot yet promise to bring back.

The crowd congestion rating dialog set to Heavy, ready to submit

Rate to share

Crowd congestion ratings

One tap reported how bad it was right then. Ratings pooled per station and per direction, and the score sharpened as more people weighed in. That loop is what made the whole thing work.

The Ticket Price screen calculating a 28 peso fare between two stations

Plan your trip

Fares & travel time

Two sliders set origin and destination and returned the exact fare for Single Journey and Stored Value tickets, the estimated travel time, and the landmarks around each stop. Useful for budgeting a trip, not just surviving one.

The Community Chat screen with commuters posting live queue updates

Ask anyone

Community chat

A live room of commuters on the same lines. "Mahaba na ang pila." "Wala pang pila." Strangers warning strangers, in the only language that mattered at 6pm. The kind of update no schedule will ever give you.

The network

Every station on
the Philippine rail network

Fifty-one operating rapid transit stations across three Metro Manila lines, plus the two PNR commuter services. This is the map the relaunch has to cover, considerably bigger than the one the 2018 app shipped with.

LRT-1 LRT-2 MRT-3 PNR Metro PNR Bicol Filled chips mark terminals; faded chips are stations not currently served.
LRT-1

LRT Line 1 (Yellow Line)Fernando Poe Jr. ⇄ Dr. Santos

Operational
  • Fernando Poe Jr.
  • Balintawak
  • Monumento
  • 5th Avenue
  • R. Papa
  • Abad Santos
  • Blumentritt
  • Tayuman
  • Bambang
  • Doroteo Jose
  • Carriedo
  • Central Terminal
  • United Nations
  • Pedro Gil
  • Quirino
  • Vito Cruz
  • Gil Puyat
  • Libertad
  • EDSA
  • Baclaran
  • Redemptorist-Aseana
  • MIA Road
  • PITX
  • Ninoy Aquino Avenue
  • Dr. Santos

25 stations24.4 kmCavite Extension Phase 1 opened 16 Nov 2024

LRT-2

LRT Line 2 (Purple Line)Recto ⇄ Antipolo

Operational
  • Recto
  • Legarda
  • Pureza
  • V. Mapa
  • J. Ruiz
  • Gilmore
  • Betty Go-Belmonte
  • Araneta Center-Cubao
  • Anonas
  • Katipunan
  • Santolan
  • Marikina-Pasig
  • Antipolo

13 stations17.6 kmEast Extension opened 5 Jul 2021

MRT-3

MRT Line 3 (Blue Line)North Avenue ⇄ Taft Avenue

Operational
  • North Avenue
  • Quezon Avenue
  • GMA-Kamuning
  • Araneta Center-Cubao
  • Santolan-Annapolis
  • Ortigas
  • Shaw Boulevard
  • Boni
  • Guadalupe
  • Buendia
  • Ayala
  • Magallanes
  • Taft Avenue

13 stations16.9 kmRuns the length of EDSA

PNR

PNR Metro CommuterGovernor Pascual ⇄ Calamba

Suspended
  • Governor Pascual
  • Caloocan
  • Asistio Avenue
  • C-3 Road
  • Solis
  • Tutuban
  • Blumentritt
  • Laong-Laan
  • España
  • Santa Mesa
  • Pandacan
  • Paco
  • San Andres
  • Vito Cruz
  • Dela Rosa
  • Pasay Road
  • EDSA
  • Nichols
  • FTI
  • Bicutan
  • Sucat
  • Alabang
  • Muntinlupa
  • San Pedro
  • Pacita Complex
  • Golden City
  • Biñan
  • Santa Rosa
  • Cabuyao
  • Mamatid
  • Calamba

31 stations≈66 kmSuspended 28 Mar 2024 for North-South Commuter Railway construction; the northern segment above Tutuban had already closed in July 2023

PNR

PNR Bicol CommuterSipocot ⇄ Naga ⇄ Legazpi

Partial service
  • Sipocot
  • Awayan
  • Mantalisay
  • Camambugan
  • Libmanan
  • Pamplona
  • Naga
  • Pili
  • Iriga
  • Ligao
  • Daraga
  • *Legazpi

12 stations≈145 kmSipocot-Naga running; Naga-Legazpi suspended after Typhoon Uwan, Nov 2025

SOON

Under constructionLines the relaunch will need to carry

Building

North-South Commuter Railway: 147 km, Clark to Calamba, replacing the suspended PNR Metro Commuter. Partial Clark-Valenzuela service is targeted for the end of 2027.

MRT Line 7: North Avenue to San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, connecting at the North Triangle common station.

Metro Manila Subway: the country's first underground line, Valenzuela to NAIA via Ortigas and Taguig.

LRT-1 Cavite Extension Phases 2 and 3: Las Piñas, Zapote, Talaba and Niog, carrying Line 1 into Bacoor by 2031.

LRT-2 West Extension: Tutuban, Divisoria and Pier 4, taking Line 2 to the Manila port area.

Network status as of September 2026. Rail service in the Philippines changes often. Suspensions, reopenings and renamed stations are the norm, which is exactly the problem TrainsPh exists to solve.

Traction

It worked

Where TrainsPh stood when it was presented at Hackatren.

0k

Registered commuters

0%

Growth in monthly active users

0%

Growth in yearly downloads

0k

User sessions

0%

Crash-free users

0/5

Google Play rating

Figures as reported at the Hackatren showcase, 15 July 2018.

Screens

The app, as it shipped

Ten screens from the Android build. No mockups, no redraws.

Train News timeline of rail advisories
Train news
The embedded official LRT-1 operator feed
Operator feed
Station list with distance to each LRT-1 station
Station proximity
Live CCTV of the ticketing area and platform
Live CCTV
Four CCTV tiles with a congestion rating strip below
Camera grid
Submitting a Heavy crowd congestion rating
Rating bar
Ticket price calculator showing a 28 peso fare
Ticket price
Trip planner with fare, travel time and a transit map
Plan your trip
Landmark guide for the selected station
Landmark guide
Community chat with live commuter messages
Community chat

Story

Why it exists

There was no market study and no pitch deck. There was this, most evenings, for years.

Looking down from a footbridge onto a packed station platform at rush hour, commuters pressed shoulder to shoulder around a train door while a guard watches from the steps
“Government’s pigment: desaturated.” Nico’s own photo of his daily commute, and the caption he gave it at the time. This is the picture that started TrainsPh. Not a business case, just a platform at rush hour and the conviction that the people standing on it deserved better information than they were being given. He built the app for them.

History

Commuting around Metro Manila has always been the hardest part of the day, especially from the far north or south. There is no dependable departure time, no dependable arrival time, and a queue nobody can predict.

One rush hour, stuck in exactly that, we asked what we could do with the thing we were actually good at, building software, to give our fellow commuters back some of their evening. Less travel time, less money, and a safer trip. That question became TrainsPh.

Mission

To help commuters get home easier and be more productive, and to be a platform where technology genuinely contributes to the daily commute.

We want the community to make full use of crowdsourcing rather than waiting on the resources the government has available. The goal was never just an app. It was proof that commuters can be an information network for each other.

The hard part

Trying to make it official

TrainsPh ran on public data and volunteer time, and it was never an official anything. Not for want of asking.

In July 2018 the app was pitched at HACKATREN, the hackathon run by Light Rail Manila Corporation around LRT Line 1, with the Hub of Innovation for Inclusion and De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. It finished as a finalist.

Around that came everything else you do when you want a side project taken seriously: the emails, the meetings, the follow-ups. To operators, to agencies, to anyone who might turn a working app already used by thousands of commuters into something officially supported.

None of it landed. No partnership, no data agreement, no endorsement. The app kept running the only way it could, on crowdsourcing and goodwill, until it came off the store.

The rebuild starts from the same position. If that changes, good. If it does not, it gets built anyway.

The CCTV is the clearest case. Those feeds were the most useful thing in the app, and at some point the Department of Transportation took them down. We were never told why, and we still do not know. Getting them back, or finding another route to the same information, is part of the rebuild.

Finalist, HACKATREN 2018

Light Rail Transit Line 1, 15 July 2018. The furthest the project got toward anything official.

Public data, then none

Station CCTV came from the Department of Transportation. The access was public and never formalised, so when it went, it went.

Built anyway

Thousands of commuters used it for years without a single institution signing off on it.

HACKATREN 2018 certificate naming John Nicholai Villegas a finalist, Light Rail Transit Line 1, 15 July 2018
The finalist certificate, 15 July 2018
The TrainsPh team card from HACKATREN, showing three team members with the event and Light Rail Manila Corporation logos
The TrainsPh team at HACKATREN
Four members of the TrainsPh team standing together at the HACKATREN venue
On the day, at the venue

The coverage came. The partnership did not.

  • CNN Philippines The Service Road with James Deakin, on monitoring the MRT from your phone
  • GMA Network Apps to help you beat Manila traffic, 17 October 2019. Listed with Waze, Google Maps, Angkas and MMDA.

Next stops

Where the line goes

The roadmap set out at Hackatren, and still the plan for the relaunch.

Real-time train tracking

Show the next train approaching your station, not just the state of the platform.

Automated crowd rating

Read congestion from the existing CCTV feeds with computer vision, so the score holds up even when nobody remembers to tap the rating bar.

Train tour guide

Turn the landmark guide into a proper route for visitors seeing Metro Manila by rail.

New railway lines

Extend beyond LRT-1, LRT-2, MRT-3 and PNR as the network grows.

Server controls & optimisation

Proper operational tooling behind the app, and a lighter, faster client in front of it.

Who we are

Built by a commuter

Portrait of John Nicholai Villegas, founder of TrainsPh

John Nicholai Villegas “Nico”

Founder, TAIO Labs

Nico has been building software since 2015, mostly across fintech and retail. In 2018, the same year TrainsPh went to Hackatren, he started TAIO Labs, the studio he still runs.

Before that: mobile developer on medical software in Belgium, engineering roles at one of the country's leading fintech companies and later at a Fortune 500 payments technology company, and an interview with James Deakin on CNN Philippines about TrainsPh. Today he is senior manager for solutions architecture, and is taking an MBA at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

TrainsPh is where the pattern started, and it is the one he keeps coming back to: find an ordinary problem nobody has got around to, then build the thing that fixes it.

LinkedIn Email
The studio behind the relaunch TAIO Labs “Built for tayo” A Philippine development studio building apps, websites and connected hardware, taking on the ordinary problems nobody has got around to. Running since 2018. taiolabs.com
John Nicholai Villegas being interviewed by James Deakin about TrainsPh
TrainsPh on CNN Philippines with James Deakin.

Thanks

Never a one-person project

TrainsPh got built because these people gave their time to it. The first version owes them, and so does the next one.

  • Jovi Granados
  • Cathya Santos
  • Lara Villegas
  • Carlos Pacat
  • Richtum Salada

TrainsPh is coming back

The app is off the store while it is rebuilt. Leave your name and we will tell you the day it returns, or just say hello, tell us which line you ride, and what you want it to do this time.

Notify me at relaunch Follow on Facebook

No mail app? Email taioappsdevelopment@gmail.com directly.