Friday, 13 November 2026

Friday, 13 November 2026 was a poor day on the railway: of the 19,624 passenger trains whose arrival was recorded, 81% were within five minutes, and a further 850 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.

3,539 trains arrived more than five minutes late and 195 more than half an hour, against 15,890 that ran to time. The average delay across every train whose arrival was recorded was 2.7 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” — 867 services carried it. Darwin publishes these as complete sentences written for passengers, so they appear here unedited.

The busiest hour was 07:00, with 1,663 booked departures and an average delay of 2.9 minutes.

Buses on this date: 135,801 journeys followed to their destination, 71.0% on time.

The day in numbers

Every percentage among the bands is of the 19,624 trains whose arrival reached the archive — not of all 26,259, and the bands are exclusive. 5,785 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 3,062 runs down to SO on 1. 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 81% and 78% — 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 568 of the 850 cancellations (66.8%), 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 47m behind schedule — London Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport, booked away at 17:05, run by Greater Anglia. The ten longest range from 1h 47m down to 1h 04m, and they belong to 7 operators, Great Western Railway 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 18:00, when 52% of 1,536 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 17.

What ran

Formations were recorded for 27,148 trains on this date, made up of 2,890 individual units and 12,741 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 3,199 of the day's recorded trains from a pool of 219 units.

The average train was 5.5 vehicles long. The longest formation recorded was 16 vehicles.

Of 26,259 runs, 27,148 had a formation published (103%) — these are allocations rather than observations.

Buses

17,534 buses from 190 operators were seen on this date, across 3,210,159 position reports.

135,801 bus journeys were followed to their destination on this date. 96,479 arrived on time, 7,764 late, and 31,558 — 23% — 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 (89%), and National Express furthest from it (30%).

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

Recorded live from the Darwin and TRUST feeds on 13 Nov 2026 itself. How these figures are measured · Sources and licences