Saturday, 12 September 2026

Saturday, 12 September 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 16,627 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 90% were within five minutes, and a further 833 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 24,952 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

1,527 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 68 more than half an hour, against 15,032 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.1 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” — 465 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 17:00, with 1,493 booked departures and an average delay of 1.9 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 16,627 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 24,952, and the bands are exclusive. 7,492 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 2,914 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 90% and 86% — 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 628 of the 833 cancellations (75.4%), 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 46m behind schedule — Edinburgh to Fort William, booked away at 04:50, run by Caledonian Sleeper. The ten longest range from 2h 46m down to 59 min, and they belong to 7 operators, Caledonian Sleeper 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 16:00, when 17% of 1,491 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 26.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 24,026 trains on this date, made up of 2,602 individual units and 11,403 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 2,391 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 173 units.

The average train was 5.5 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 24 vehicles.

Of 24,952 runs, 24,026 had a formation published (96%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

15,586 buses from 157 operators were seen on this date, across 2,803,579 position reports.

127,479 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 89,740 arrived on time, 7,448 late, and 30,291 — 24% — 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 640 journeys finished more than twenty minutes down.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company ran closest to time (87%), 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 12 Sept 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences