Monday, 17 August 2026

Monday, 17 August 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 18,596 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 87% were within five minutes, and a further 807 were cancelled outright.

An ordinary weekday timetable, with the two commuter peaks that give the network most of its work and least of its slack.

2,357 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 134 more than half an hour, against 16,105 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.8 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” — 522 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 07:00, with 1,684 booked departures and an average delay of 1.2 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 18,596 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 26,395, and the bands are exclusive. 6,992 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

37 operators ran passenger services on this date, from ScotRail on 3,113 runs down to LS on 8. 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 87% and 83% — 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 541 of the 807 cancellations (67.0%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 2h 29m behind schedule — Colchester to London Liverpool Street, booked away at 04:41, run by Greater Anglia. The ten longest range from 2h 29m down to 1h 17m, and they belong to 4 operators, Greater Anglia accounting for 4. 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 17:00, when 34% of 1,637 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 14.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 26,271 trains on this date, made up of 2,826 individual units and 12,367 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 3,110 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 218 units.

The average train was 5.6 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 20 vehicles.

Of 26,395 runs, 26,271 had a formation published (100%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

16,379 buses from 168 operators were seen on this date, across 3,033,456 position reports.

125,497 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 84,810 arrived on time, 5,426 late, and 35,261 — 28% — 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 0.5 minutes ahead of schedule — the early arrivals outweighing the late ones.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Uni-Link ran closest to time (87%), and National Express furthest from it (30%).

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

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 17 Aug 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences