Monday, 26 October 2026

1,782 of the 12,816 passenger trains recorded on Monday, 26 October 2026 never ran, and those that did were an average of 5 minutes down. This is what a badly disrupted day looks like in the raw feed.

The largest single cause of cancellation was recorded 205 times, and the industry's own wording for it was “This service has been cancelled because of a fault with the signalling system”. 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.

An ordinary weekday timetable, with the two commuter peaks that give the network most of its work and least of its slack.

c2c lost the largest share of its own timetable — 51.8% of 280 booked runs, against 13.9% 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 1h 39m on the 05:15 Southampton Central to Manchester Piccadilly.

Buses on this date: 130,429 journeys followed to their destination, 69.9% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 8,929 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 12,816, and the bands are exclusive. 2,105 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 Northern on 1,528 runs down to West Coast Railway Co 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 72% and 60% — 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 1,080 of the 1,782 cancellations (60.6%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 1h 39m behind schedule — Southampton Central to Manchester Piccadilly, booked away at 05:15, run by CrossCountry. The ten longest range from 1h 39m down to 1h 19m, and they belong to 6 operators, Northern accounting for 4. 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 17:00, when 0% of 109 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 23:00 with 14.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 26,422 trains on this date, made up of 2,827 individual units and 12,509 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 3,163 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 214 units.

The average train was 5.6 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 22 vehicles.

Of 12,816 runs, 26,422 had a formation published (206%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

16,692 buses from 167 operators were seen on this date, across 3,049,975 position reports.

130,429 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 91,227 arrived on time, 5,618 late, and 33,584 — 26% — 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 0.3 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 (89%), 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 26 Oct 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences