New website shines a light on punctuality

If you’re a regular traveller on a particular train you probably know whether it’s reliably punctual. Now there’s a new website that lets you check whether your perception matches reality.

Liverpool company Glow New Media developed the MyTrainJourney online tool to allow passengers to check the punctuality of trains over the last week, month or year. I’m spared a daily commute but tried a couple of trains to see how they’d performed. There are plenty of complaints about Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) at the moment, so I started with an early train from Brighton, timed to arrive in London for an onward walk to an office. How has the 0712 performed over the past month? It’s due into London Victoria at 0823 and the site tells me that 15 of 20 weekday trains arrived within one minute, giving a right-time performance of 75%. All but one train arrived within 15 minutes. The website doesn’t use the railway’s five and ten-minute deadlines that feed into public performance measure (PPM). Despite this, I was pleasantly surprised that this train was punctual to the minute, three-quarters of the time.

Having randomly picked the 0712, I thought I should try the 0729, the service that newspapers reckoned never arrived on time in 2014. The stats whizzed across my screen… of 246 trains over the last year, the number on time to within one minute…155. That’s 63%. Better than its reputation but with plenty of room to improve.

I’ve been known to catch York’s 0701 to London. It’s a Virgin Trains East Coast service and is usually very busy. It stops only at Peterborough on its way south, which makes it convenient for RAIL’s office, and it’s the first reasonably fast train to London. Over the past year, it has run 254 times, with 149 arriving within a minute of the scheduled time, 240 within 15 minutes and 247 within 60 minutes. That leaves seven arriving over an hour late. Overall, it’s been on time 59% of the time.

Other than pleasing the curious, what purpose does such a site serve? It shines a light on punctuality. I can see its information appearing in complaint letters to TOC managing directors. Coupled with improved passenger counting methods, the information behind the website makes it easier to calculate delays as a combination of time and passengers. London Underground uses ‘lost customers hours’ as a wider measure of the effect delays have. The Rail Delivery Group should consider such a measure because today PPM ascribes the same effect to a train of fresh air being ten minutes late as to a train carrying 1,000 passengers.