Thursday, 29 October 2026

Thursday, 29 October 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 21,300 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 87% were within five minutes, and a further 829 were cancelled outright.

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

2,743 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 117 more than half an hour, against 18,440 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.8 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” — 712 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 07:00, with 1,714 booked departures and an average delay of 1.8 minutes.

Buses on this date: 132,816 journeys followed to their destination, 70.9% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 21,300 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 27,039, and the bands are exclusive. 4,910 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 3,009 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 87% and 83% — 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 608 of the 829 cancellations (73.3%), across 8 distinct reasons. A run cancelled part-way along often carries no reason at all.

The longest delays

The worst of them arrived 9h 57m behind schedule — Motherwell to Dalmuir, booked away at 12:26, run by ScotRail. The ten longest range from 9h 57m down to 1h 20m, and they belong to 6 operators, ScotRail 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 04:00, when 55% of 174 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 26,534 trains on this date, made up of 2,852 individual units and 12,565 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 3,173 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 216 units.

The average train was 5.7 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 18 vehicles.

Of 27,039 runs, 26,534 had a formation published (98%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

16,777 buses from 164 operators were seen on this date, across 3,139,326 position reports.

132,816 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 94,217 arrived on time, 6,877 late, and 31,722 — 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 0.1 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 (90%), 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 29 Oct 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences