Northern Ports & Transpennine
Last updated 25 May 2026
Immingham to Manchester via Doncaster, Sheffield, and the Hope Valley or Standedge — the Transpennine freight route linking the Humber ports to the North West.
| NR route | North East / North West |
| Route chain | Immingham – Scunthorpe – Doncaster – Mexborough – Sheffield – Hope Valley or Standedge – Manchester |
| Key constraints | Hope Valley capacity; Standedge tunnel; Doncaster area |
| Trailing 12-period A2F | Fewer than 12 closed periods of clean data on record — available once the pipeline reaches 12 complete periods. |
Latest period summary
Northern Ports & Transpennine recorded 76% A2F punctuality in Period 2 2026-27 (26 April – 23 May 2026) on 1,709 freight services, down 4 percentage points from 80% in Period 1 2026-27 on a smaller denominator. The intervals do not overlap with the prior period. PRELIMINARY at T+2; FINAL re-publication at T+35 after Network Rail's batch correction.
Reports
Operators active
Methodology & sources
All figures derive from Network Rail's NROD TRUST feed, processed via the Gauge Intelligence ingest pipeline. Period definitions, A2F (Arrival to Fifteen), the Wilson 90% interval, daily anomaly rules, cross-view reconciliation, and delay attribution are documented at:
Data window — period boundaries and the data-as-of cutoff
League tables — cross-view reconciliation across the four analytical views
Anomaly detection — daily A2F SPC rules
Delay attribution — DAPR cause-code breakdown
Forecasting — prediction intervals and possession-exposure estimates
The Northern Ports & Transpennine corridor carries biomass, coal residue, steel, aggregates, and intermodal traffic between the Humber ports — Immingham and the Killingholme terminals — and the North West via Doncaster and Sheffield. It is the principal east-west route across northern England for bulk and intermodal freight.
Capacity through the Hope Valley and the Standedge tunnel shapes Transpennine pathing. The corridor interchanges with the East Coast Main Line at Doncaster and the South & West Yorkshire corridor around Sheffield.