About Gauge Intelligence

Gauge Intelligence is an independent public record of how UK rail freight is running. It is not a consultancy, a vendor, or an advocacy body.

Publisher

Gauge Intelligence is published by Keith McDonnell, an independent industry analyst-publisher, trading as Dancing Text LTD (England). The archive is produced and maintained from Suffolk, England.

Independence

Gauge Intelligence has no commercial relationships with freight operating companies, Network Rail, or the Office of Rail and Road. No consulting, no advisory work, no sponsored content. The analysis is funded independently and published without editorial interference from any industry party.

This independence is structural, not aspirational. The value of the record depends on it.

Data sources and provenance

The archive is computed from the following public and official data sources:

• Network Rail Open Data (NROD) — real-time TRUST train movement messages, ingested continuously. This is the primary source for journey-level punctuality, cancellation, and timing data.
• Historic Delay Attribution (HDA) — Network Rail’s periodic publication assigning DAPR cause codes to individual delay events. Used for delay reason breakdowns and infrastructure attribution.
• ORR published data — national freight statistics, including Table 1325 (freight moved by commodity and route). Used for regulatory context and cross-referencing.
• CIF timetable data — scheduled timings from the Common Interface File. Provides the planned journey against which actual performance is measured.
• BPLAN geography — Network Rail’s track topology dataset, mapping STANOX locations to physical routes and corridors.

Gauge Intelligence processes all source data programmatically. No figures are adjusted manually.

Methodology

All methodology is versioned, published, and reproducible. See methodology. Where a figure changes after publication — whether from revised source data, a calculation correction, or a methodology update — the correction is logged publicly with full provenance.

Founding rationale

Gauge Intelligence was founded in 2026. The rationale: no independent, corridor-level freight performance data existed in the public domain.

ORR publishes aggregate national statistics. Network Rail publishes internal metrics. Neither provides the granular, all-operator corridor analysis that operators, regulators, and supply chain planners need to make informed decisions. This archive fills that gap.

Audience

The public archive exists to make freight performance legible to anyone with a professional interest: operators, infrastructure managers, regulators, supply chain planners, and researchers. Commercial licensing is available separately for redistribution and integration use cases.

Contact

Keith McDonnell — [email protected]