STOPPED IN THEIR TRACKS
The train services with the highest rates of cancellations
NEARLY 200,000 trains were cancelled last year, leaving passengers stranded and forced to take diversions to reach their destination.
There were 7.3 million scheduled passenger train services that should have run in 2017/18 - but 188,616 were fully or partly cancelled, or didn't call at all their planned stops.
That works out as a rate of one in every 39 train services being cancelled, analysis of figures from the Office of Rail and Road reveal.
The situation is far worse than in 2014/15, when modern records began. That year, one in every 55 trains was cancelled.
There are 23 franchised train operators running on the UK's railway system, which was privatised between 1994 and 1997.
It means operators can set their own fares without government regulation.
Train cancellations may often be beyond operators' control, and could also be caused by infrastructure faults, severe weather, or trespassers.
Govia Thameslink Railway had the worst rate of cancellation of all train operators in 2017/18, with one every 23 of its planned 1.1 million passenger train journeys cancelled. The operator runs routes in areas such as London, Cambridge, Brighton, and Sevenoaks.
Hull Trains saw one in every 29 trains cancelled in 2017/18 - the secondworst rate, followed by TransPennine Express (one in every 31). Chiltern Railways, meanwhile, saw just one in every 83 of its 141,794 planned trains cancelled.
Most - but not all - train companies operate a system known as “delay repay”, which means that passengers can get part or all of the money spent on their ticket refunded depending on if their train was cancelled or significantly delayed.
Some 15 of the 23 train operators are signed up to this scheme.
Earlier this year the Department for Transport published figures on the 10 most overcrowded train services, and Govia Thameslink and TransPennine Express both featured twice on the list.
Two Manchester services run by TransPennine Express were filled to more than three times their capacity - the highest rates of overcrowding that the figures showed. A Govia Thameslink spokesperson said: "We run far more trains than any other operator, on the country's busiest and most congested network. “However, reliability has been very good recently, with Southern recording its best performance in over five years and Thameslink running 200 more trains every day than last year at similar performance levels."