Sunday, 16 August 2026

Sunday, 16 August 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 11,165 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 85% were within five minutes, and a further 606 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 16,353 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

1,476 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 241 more than half an hour, against 9,448 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 2.5 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” — 283 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 16:00, with 1,125 booked departures and an average delay of 3.4 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 11,165 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 16,353, and the bands are exclusive. 4,582 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 1,565 runs down to North Yorkshire Moors Railway on 4. 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 85% and 80% — 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 408 of the 606 cancellations (67.3%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 4h 09m behind schedule — Bradford Forster Square to London Kings Cross, booked away at 09:35, run by London North Eastern Railway. The ten longest range from 4h 09m down to 1h 41m, and all ten were London North Eastern Railway. 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 10:00, when 47% of 1,086 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 03:00 with 18.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 14,353 trains on this date, made up of 2,012 individual units and 8,968 separate vehicles. These figures cover the services an allocation was published for, not every train that ran.

25 different classes of train appeared, which is the signature of a full weekday — the long-distance fleets, the regional diesel units and the suburban electrics all working at once.

The most-used class was the 377, allocated to 1,457 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 116 units.

The average train was 5.9 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 24 vehicles.

Of 16,353 runs, 14,353 had a formation published (88%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

10,988 buses from 123 operators were seen on this date, across 1,975,388 position reports.

86,454 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 54,670 arrived on time, 6,652 late, and 25,132 — 29% — 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 0.1 minutes ahead of schedule — the early arrivals outweighing the late ones.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company ran closest to time (81%), and National Express furthest from it (32%).

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

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 16 Aug 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences