Sunday, 11 October 2026

Sunday, 11 October 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 13,344 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 91% were within five minutes, and a further 480 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 18,594 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

1,163 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 69 more than half an hour, against 12,112 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 0.9 minutes.

The reason attached most often to a late train was “This service has been delayed by a speed restriction” — 511 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 16:00, with 1,230 booked departures and an average delay of 0.7 minutes.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 13,344 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 18,594, and the bands are exclusive. 4,770 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 South Western Railway on 1,990 runs down to North Yorkshire Moors Railway on 2. 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 91% and 88% — 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 206 of the 480 cancellations (42.9%), 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 17m behind schedule — Newcastle to Middlesbrough, booked away at 10:48, run by Northern. The ten longest range from 2h 17m down to 1h 15m, and they belong to 5 operators, CrossCountry 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 06:00, when 47% of 253 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 22.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 15,790 trains on this date, made up of 2,159 individual units and 9,627 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 1,809 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 166 units.

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

Of 18,594 runs, 15,790 had a formation published (85%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

11,173 buses from 122 operators were seen on this date, across 2,022,953 position reports.

97,848 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 64,496 arrived on time, 7,117 late, and 26,235 — 27% — 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 0.1 minutes late, and 514 journeys finished more than twenty minutes down.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Fastrack (operated by Go Ahead) ran closest to time (86%), and National Express furthest from it (34%).

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

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