Direct Rail Services
Last updated 25 May 2026
Nuclear flask haulier and intermodal operator, running the national nuclear flask network and commercial container trains principally on the West Coast Main Line.
| Active since | 1995 |
| Trailing 12-period A2F | Fewer than 12 closed periods of clean data on record — available once the pipeline reaches 12 complete periods. |
| Schedule 8 — CP7 cumulative | Available under commercial licence. CP7 rates £25.81/min NR-to-FOC, £51.98/min FOC-to-NR (2× asymmetry). Bilateral net position is the licensed product — see methodology. |
| Fleet specialisation | Nuclear and intermodal (nuclear flask haulage plus commercial container traffic) |
| Parent / ownership | Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (wholly owned) |
Latest period summary
Direct Rail Services ran 468 freight services in Period 2 2026-27 at 95% A2F punctuality, against a national freight mean of 90% over 12,042 services. A2F rose by 6 percentage points on Period 1 2026-27 (89%); the 90% Wilson intervals do not overlap. DRS ranked first against peer freight operators on 1 of the 13 corridors it shared with another FOC over the period. PRELIMINARY at T+2; FINAL re-publication at T+35 after Network Rail's batch correction.
Reports
Corridors served
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
Direct Rail Services is wholly owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and carries spent nuclear fuel between power stations and reprocessing facilities. It also operates commercial intermodal trains. The West Coast Main Line carries the highest share of its services, reflecting both the nuclear flask network and its Daventry-to-Grangemouth container corridor. In Period 2 2026-27 it recorded 333 non-cancelled services with an A2F of 96%.