Recently, it is found that telegraph equation is more suitable than ordinary diffusion equation in modelling reaction diffusion for such branches of sciences. In this article, we propose a numerical scheme to solve the one‐dimensional hyperbolic telegraph equation using collocation points and approximating the solution using thin plate splines radial basis function. The scheme works in a similar fashion as finite difference methods. The results of numerical experiments are presented, and are compared with analytical solutions to confirm the good accuracy of the presented scheme. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2008