Saturday, 15 August 2026

Saturday, 15 August 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 13,251 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 83% were within five minutes, and a further 1,069 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 24,853 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

2,054 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 136 more than half an hour, against 11,061 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 2.4 minutes.

The reason attached most often to a late train was “This service has been delayed by a late running train being in front of this one” — 561 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 16:00, with 1,477 booked departures and an average delay of 1.9 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 13,251 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 24,853, and the bands are exclusive. 10,533 trains ran without an arrival time being recorded, and nothing is claimed about how punctual those were. Delay is judged at the destination, a stricter test than the industry's own measure and not comparable with it.

By operator

38 operators ran passenger services on this date, from ScotRail on 2,786 runs down to Caledonian Sleeper on 3. Ordered by volume, not performance — any heading re-sorts it.

“On time” is of each operator's recorded arrivals; “incl. cancelled” counts a cancellation as a failure, which is what the industry's own measure does. Across the whole day they read 83% and 77% — why both are published, what each hides, and how the sort treats a small operator.

Why trains were late

8 different reasons were given for delay on this date, each reproduced in the operator's own words.

Why trains were cancelled

A reason reached the archive for 770 of the 1,069 cancellations (72.0%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 3h 43m behind schedule — Edinburgh to Plymouth, booked away at 13:05, run by CrossCountry. The ten longest range from 3h 43m down to 1h 31m, and they belong to 5 operators, Thameslink accounting for 5. What a delay on that scale usually means.

Through the day

Booked departures by hour, with the share that arrived within five minutes. Punctuality was weakest at 04:00, when 0% of 129 arrived within five minutes.

The filled part of each bar is the share of that hour's booked departures that arrived within five minutes. The quietest was 02:00 with 24.

Buses

15,425 buses from 151 operators were seen on this date, across 2,719,026 position reports.

112,536 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 76,091 arrived on time, 6,155 late, and 30,290 — 27% — arrived ahead of schedule.

Early arrivals are normal rather than exceptional. Bus running times carry enough slack to survive traffic, and it is concentrated in the last leg, so a clear run simply finishes sooner than booked.

Averaged across every journey, buses arrived 0.3 minutes ahead of schedule — the early arrivals outweighing the late ones.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Fastrack (operated by Go Ahead) ran closest to time (85%), and National Express furthest from it (33%).

Our figures, not the regulator's — why buses run early, the current league.

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 15 Aug 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences