Sunday, 25 October 2026

1,159 of the 17,902 passenger trains recorded on Sunday, 25 October 2026 never ran, and those that did were an average of 4.9 minutes down. This is what a badly disrupted day looks like in the raw feed.

The largest single cause of cancellation was recorded 343 times, and the industry's own wording for it was “This service has been cancelled because of severe weather”. Reasons on this site are reproduced exactly as the feed publishes them, because the phrasing is the operator's account of its own day rather than ours.

A weekend timetable, so the 17,902 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

Avanti West Coast lost the largest share of its own timetable — 14.7% of 299 booked runs, against 6.5% across the network. On a day like this the figure says more about where the disruption sat geographically than about the operator.

The worst individual delay recorded was 3h 23m on the 16:08 Newcastle to Edinburgh.

Buses on this date: 92,167 journeys followed to their destination, 65.7% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 11,063 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 17,902, and the bands are exclusive. 5,680 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 South Western Railway on 1,792 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 78% and 70% — 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 962 of the 1,159 cancellations (83.0%), 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 23m behind schedule — Newcastle to Edinburgh, booked away at 16:08, run by Lumo. The ten longest range from 3h 23m down to 2h 49m, and they belong to 4 operators, ScotRail accounting for 5. 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 05:00, when 34% of 101 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 24.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 15,708 trains on this date, made up of 2,167 individual units and 9,650 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 1,493 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 146 units.

The average train was 6 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 24 vehicles.

Of 17,902 runs, 15,708 had a formation published (88%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

11,223 buses from 117 operators were seen on this date, across 1,994,842 position reports.

92,167 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 60,576 arrived on time, 6,249 late, and 25,342 — 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.

Averaged across every journey, buses arrived 0.1 minutes ahead of schedule — the early arrivals outweighing the late ones.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Uni-Link ran closest to time (91%), 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 25 Oct 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences