Punctuality and reliability improves during pandemic

The punctuality and reliability of Britain’s railway rose in 2020 to the highest levels for the second quarter of a year (July-September) since the Office of Rail and Road’s on-time recording measures began in 2014-15.

The on-time punctuality measure increased by 14.3 percentage points (pp) to 79.3% of trains on time (early or less than one minute after the scheduled arrival time), compared with the corresponding period in 2019-20.

The Public Performance Measure increased by 6.8pp to 93.3% (the best level since 2010-11), with cancellations falling by 1.2pp to 2.2% of trains.

However, the ORR notes that the number of trains planned in the second quarter of the year was 17.7% less than in 2019. Passenger usage is also far lower, at less than half equivalent weekly levels in 2019 and as low as 16% in early July.

“These changes in trains planned and passenger usage have led to improvements in punctuality and reliability relative to previous years,” it said.

“These improvements in performance are clearly visible when looking at individual quarters, but less so when using moving annual averages to present changes in performance.”

It adds that although punctuality is lower than in the first quarter of the year (April-June), this is likely to relate to the increase in services and in the number of passengers travelling after the first lockdown was eased.

Allied to the improvement in punctuality is a reduction in delay minutes (time lost between consecutive timing points on the rail network). Those attributed to Network Rail fell by 50%, and those to train operators by 64%.

All train operators bar c2c recorded improvements in on-time punctuality, and only Chiltern and ScotRail recorded worse reliability (see tables).