Friday, 11 September 2026

Friday, 11 September 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 21,224 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 87% were within five minutes, and a further 889 were cancelled outright.

Friday carries the heaviest long-distance loading of the week, and it is the day on which a late-afternoon problem has the fewest spare paths to recover into.

2,584 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 132 more than half an hour, against 18,508 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.7 minutes.

The reason attached most often to a late train was “This service has been delayed by a speed restriction” — 595 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 07:00, with 1,660 booked departures and an average delay of 1.6 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 21,224 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 25,672, and the bands are exclusive. 3,559 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 3,037 runs down to TY 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 87% and 84% — 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 572 of the 889 cancellations (64.3%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 2h 21m behind schedule — London Euston to Inverness, booked away at 21:15, run by Caledonian Sleeper. The ten longest range from 2h 21m down to 1h 39m, and they belong to 7 operators, CrossCountry accounting for 2. 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 18:00, when 65% of 1,523 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 13.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 26,785 trains on this date, made up of 2,905 individual units and 12,758 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 3,078 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 216 units.

The average train was 5.6 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 24 vehicles.

Of 25,672 runs, 26,785 had a formation published (104%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

17,361 buses from 192 operators were seen on this date, across 3,174,172 position reports.

138,444 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 98,420 arrived on time, 8,301 late, and 31,723 — 23% — 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.

The average arrival was 0 minutes late, and 920 journeys finished more than twenty minutes down.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Reading Buses ran closest to time (88%), and National Express furthest from it (31%).

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

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 11 Sept 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences