Saturday, 22 August 2026

Saturday, 22 August 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 17,772 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 87% were within five minutes, and a further 816 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 24,562 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

2,225 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 91 more than half an hour, against 15,456 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.5 minutes.

The reason attached most often to a late train was “This service has been delayed by a safety inspection of the track” — 679 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 17:00, with 1,465 booked departures and an average delay of 1.8 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 17,772 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 24,562, and the bands are exclusive. 5,974 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

39 operators ran passenger services on this date, from ScotRail on 2,873 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 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 488 of the 816 cancellations (59.8%), 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 09m behind schedule — Manchester Victoria to Leeds, booked away at 06:30, run by Northern. The ten longest range from 3h 09m down to 55 min, and they belong to 6 operators, Southern accounting for 3. 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 11:00, when 38% of 1,431 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 28.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 24,473 trains on this date, made up of 2,633 individual units and 11,536 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 2,578 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 189 units.

The average train was 5.5 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 22 vehicles.

Of 24,562 runs, 24,473 had a formation published (100%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

15,442 buses from 152 operators were seen on this date, across 2,731,939 position reports.

114,833 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 78,253 arrived on time, 6,233 late, and 30,347 — 26% — 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 0.2 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 (84%), 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 22 Aug 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences