Written September 2026
It can do half of it. Maps is excellent at the geography: it will show you the drive, the stations near it, the distance and roughly how long the detour costs. What it does not do is price a UK rail ticket. So it can tell you a station is on the way, and it cannot tell you that boarding there costs three times what boarding twenty minutes further along would have cost.
Most people do this by hand. Open Maps, drop a pin on where the driver is going, drop another on where you need to be, eyeball something near the middle, then search that town's station and hope. It is a reasonable instinct and it fails for one reason: you are optimising the thing you can see, which is distance, instead of the thing you are actually trying to reduce, which is what you pay.
The geometric midpoint between two places is almost never the right station. British fares are set route by route, not by the mile, so the price jumps between neighbouring stations for reasons no map shows. A station ten miles further on can be cheaper, better served, and a smaller detour for the driver, all at once. None of that is visible from above.
A search we ran on 1 September 2026: the driver going from Bath to Birmingham, the passenger needing Manchester. Booked from Bath, the journey was £116.80. Getting out at Sandwell and Dudley instead, which costs the driver a seven minute detour, it was £49.00. Sandwell and Dudley is not a station anybody picks by eye off a map, and that is rather the point. Nothing about its position on the screen tells you it is the cheap one.
Maps is still the right tool for the road. Use it to see the route and to send the driver where they are going. Then let Partway, our free iPhone app, do the half a map cannot: it checks live trains and real bookable fares from every station along the drive, weighs each against simply catching a train from where you started, and tells you plainly when the answer is to stay in the car.
Stop eyeballing the middle of the map. Get Partway on the App Store and get the station, the train and the price in about ten seconds.