Railway Performance Issues

Data from Network Rail, shows that for the 4-weeks from 15 October to 11 November (Period 8), GTR’s performance was for 75.3% of all their trains to be on-time (or with 4mins and 59 seconds of the time advertised in the public timetable). This is up from 70.0% on the same period 12 months ago. The moving annual average is 79.5% which suggests that things are not going too well at the moment. As this table shows for the 1 st week in December it is Network Rail matters which have a greater impact on GTR’s performance. One matter which continues to cause passenger frustration is the (apparent) frequency with which trains are cancelled at short notice due to “Train Crew” issues. These figures suggest that on any one day, somewhere over a third of all GTR’s delays are due to the management of their own staff.

GTR PERFORMANCE ACROSS THE SOUTH EAST GTR operates from Brighton on the Sussex Coast to Bedford on the Midland Main Line. From Kings Cross as far as Peterborough and Kings Lynn. Services that circulate via Sutton and Wimbledon to St Albans and Luton. Also from Sevenoaks to to St Albans and Luton They also operate the Gatwick Express service from Victoria to Gatwick Airport and Brighton along with the “Southern” service from Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Littlehampton to London also out to Portsmouth and Southampton. Their services are allocated to one of the following: Southern Coastway (Non-London) Southern Mainline Southern South London Metro Thameslink Bedford Mainline Thameslink Brighton Mainline Thameslink Kent Inner Thameslink South London Gatwick Express Great Northern Inners Great Northern Outers   These are further divided into Monday to Friday Peak and Monday to Friday Off-Peak along with all-day Saturday and Sunday. For the purposes of...

CONFUSED BY WHAT ALL THE DATA MEANS? Well you are not alone; I’ve even come across senior railway managers who don’t understand it. So, don’t feel alone, there are plenty of others out there! Partly this confusion arises between the rail industry performance regimes and the public performance measure. The former is generally known as “Schedule 8” and the latter as “PPM”. This Blog, and subsequent posts are designed to introduce interested observers to the archane word of railway performance stats. SCHEDULE 8 Between Network Rail (NR) and each Train Operator (TOC) is a contract which governs access for trains to the national rail network for which the operator pays a set of track access charges.   The main contract document is likely to be less than 40 pages. The bulk of the document (frequently runs to more than 300 pages) is a set of supporting schedules. The 8 th Schedule deals with the operation of a performance regime. The basis is that in return for paying t...