Friday, 23 October 2026

Friday, 23 October 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 20,838 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 78% were within five minutes, and a further 890 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.

3,943 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 697 more than half an hour, against 16,198 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 4.7 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” — 510 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 07:00, with 1,681 booked departures and an average delay of 2.5 minutes.

Buses on this date: 137,688 journeys followed to their destination, 70.5% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 20,838 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 26,454, and the bands are exclusive. 4,726 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 3,122 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 78% and 75% — 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 698 of the 890 cancellations (78.4%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 4h 12m behind schedule — Weymouth to Gloucester, booked away at 11:30, run by Great Western Railway. The ten longest range from 4h 12m down to 2h 49m, and they belong to 6 operators, South Western Railway 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 18:00, when 48% of 1,533 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 26,983 trains on this date, made up of 2,890 individual units and 12,671 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 3,193 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 220 units.

The average train was 5.5 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 20 vehicles.

Of 26,454 runs, 26,983 had a formation published (102%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

17,455 buses from 179 operators were seen on this date, across 3,197,458 position reports.

137,688 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 97,090 arrived on time, 6,917 late, and 33,681 — 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.

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, 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 23 Oct 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences