Tube strike today: how to get TfL updates sent live to your phone

Using Twitter and your mobile, you’ll be able to learn whenever lines are down or full

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It’s going to be very difficult to get anywhere during the Tube strike. But thankfully with a little bit of work it’s very easy to know exactly where you aren’t going to be able to get.

By setting up special Twitter alerts and following the right accounts, you’ll be able to get live updates for whenever anything happens on the tube network.

The three big accounts to follow are: @TfLTravelAlerts, @TfLBusAlerts and @TfLTrafficNews. Each line has its own account, too — so for example the @LDNOverground, which will be running, might be worth following — though most of them won’t be much use during the strike.

Other news accounts — like @Independent — will be tweeting breaking alerts through the day, so you might want to do the same with those.

For any Twitter account, you can sign up to get notifications sent straight to your mobile. Just head to the account, click on the little cog to open up the settings menu, and click “Turn on notifications”. Then, whenever the account tweets you’ll get a little message telling you they’ve done so.

Another way of following along is to create a special Twitter list. By adding all of the relevant lines to one list — again, accessed through the little cog — you can either click through to that list on the mobile app or add it as a column on Tweetdeck, for easy following.

TfL has promised to keep its Tube strike page fully updated, with information about all lines, buses and other public transport. That works fine on both mobile and web, so it’s likely to be worth bookmarking that for easy access.