Sunday, 8 November 2026

Sunday, 8 November 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 10,933 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 90% were within five minutes, and a further 492 were cancelled outright.

A weekend timetable, so the 15,129 recorded runs are well below a weekday's — most engineering possessions land here too, which shortens some routes and removes others entirely.

1,014 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 75 more than half an hour, against 9,844 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 1.2 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” — 348 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 15:00, with 1,132 booked departures and an average delay of 1.1 minutes.

Buses on this date: 98,265 journeys followed to their destination, 65.3% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 10,933 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 15,129, and the bands are exclusive. 3,704 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

36 operators ran passenger services on this date, from ScotRail on 1,497 runs down to Caledonian Sleeper on 3. 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 90% and 86% — 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 380 of the 492 cancellations (77.2%), 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 05m behind schedule — Amsterdam CS to London St Pancras (Intl), booked away at 12:40, run by Eurostar. The ten longest range from 2h 05m down to 1h 10m, and they belong to 7 operators, Elizabeth line 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 50% of 242 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 18.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 15,201 trains on this date, made up of 2,193 individual units and 9,818 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 1,513 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 127 units.

The average train was 5.9 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 20 vehicles.

Of 15,129 runs, 15,201 had a formation published (100%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

11,093 buses from 119 operators were seen on this date, across 2,013,561 position reports.

98,265 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 64,145 arrived on time, 7,223 late, and 26,897 — 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 minutes late, and 637 journeys finished more than fifteen minutes down.

By operator

Of the operators with enough journeys to compare, Uni-Link ran closest to time (90%), and National Express furthest from it (33%).

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

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 8 Nov 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences