Direct Rail Services — Period 2 2026-27 (26 April – 23 May) report

Daily on-time arrivals across Period 2 2026-27

Daily on-time arrivals are up 6.0 percentage points on Period 1 2026-27 (89% then, 95% now).

Source: Gauge Intelligence NROD-derived journey data, Period 2 2026-27. A service is counted on time when terminal arrival falls within 15 minutes of schedule. Days with no scheduled services (typically Sundays) render as gaps — a missing bar means no measurement, not a value at zero. Red bars flag days that triggered a statistical signal — see anomaly-detection methodology.

ORR's Freight rail usage and performance release publishes by Network Rail region and route, not by operator. This page publishes by operator and corridor.

Cancellation rate

In Period 2 2026-27, 1% of scheduled services were cancelled (4 of 820) — within the national mean of 4%; Network Rail infrastructure and possessions accounted for the largest share.

Cancellations are down 0.30 percentage points on Period 1 2026-27 (1% then, 1% now). The largest shifts in the responsible-party split are reported in the table below.

Attribution

Cancellation rate in Period 1 2026-27 was 1% across 1,047 scheduled paths. The current period is down 0.30 percentage points on Period 1 2026-27.

Source: NROD/TRUST activation feed and BPLAN scheduled paths, Period 2 2026-27. Cancellation rate = (post-activation + pre-activation cancellations) ÷ scheduled or activated paths. Pre-activation cancellations are TRUST CANCEL messages on schedules that never activated; post-activation cancellations have an activation and a CANCEL event. The bracketed range beside the headline rate is the 90% confidence range on the cancellation proportion given the sample size. Cause attribution uses the responsible-party mapping of the recorded cancellation reason code; see delay-attribution methodology.

DRS and peer operators, by shared corridor

The per-corridor league table for DRS is deferred while the v1.0 industry review edition corrections inbox remains open. Comparative ranking against peer freight operators on each shared corridor returns at v2.0 general availability, after the launch-cohort corrections cycle closes and the dataset has been reviewed by industry readers. The league-table methodology sets out the partial-pool estimator and the Wilson interval framework the panel will use; the release cadence page sets out the four exit criteria for v2.0 and the schedule against which they are measured.

Source: Gauge Intelligence NROD-derived journey data, Period 2 2026-27. Single-operator Wilson intervals on shared corridors continue to appear in the per-corridor breakdowns above; the per-corridor ranking against peers is the panel deferred here.

What the 15-minute threshold hides

Half of Period 2 2026-27 services arrived early — the median was 4 min ahead of timetable. The long tail the A2F binary misses: 5% of services ran +13 min or more late, and 1% arrived over +64 min late. The 15-minute A2F threshold sits at the 96th percentile — 4% of services exceeded it.

Median arrival delay is 2 minutes earlier than Period 1 2026-27 (median was -2 min then, -4 min now).

459 services with confirmed terminal arrival in Period 2 2026-27. A2F is binary at 15 minutes — this distribution surfaces what the headline figure does not show. National 99th percentile across all freight operators: 95 min.

Baseline (Period 1 2026-27): median -2 min, p99 +103 min. Period-on-period median shift -2 min.

ORR's Freight rail usage and performance release publishes by Network Rail region and route, not by operator. This page publishes by operator and corridor.

Intraday pattern

Sat (100%) is 12.1 percentage points above Sun (88%), the weakest day in Period 2 2026-27.

The 12-16 departure window records 93% A2F — 6.7 percentage points below the 00-04 peak (100%) in Period 2 2026-27.

The day-of-week spread is narrower by 0.5 percentage points on Period 1 2026-27 — punctuality varies less across the working week than the prior period.

By day of week

By departure hour

Baseline (Period 1 2026-27) day-of-week spread delta: -0.5 percentage points.

Source: NROD-derived journey data, Period 2 2026-27. Day-of-week is ISO (Mon=1..Sun=7). Hour windows are 4-hour buckets keyed off TRUST origin_dep_timestamp. A2F threshold is 15 minutes on terminal arrival. 90% Wilson interval on each cell's proportion.

Path utilisation

Activated 217 of 820 scheduled paths (27%, 90% range 24%–29%) in Period 2 2026-27 — -2.1 percentage points below the national freight-operator mean of 29%. 603 ghost paths (scheduled, not activated).

In plain terms: a scheduled path is a freight slot reserved in Network Rail's Working Timetable. An activated path is one where TRUST recorded the train starting its run. A ghost path is a scheduled slot that produced no activation — capacity held in the timetable that the operator did not use, typically because the underlying contract did not call the path or the service was withdrawn before the day. A sub-100% rate is normal: the Working Timetable carries contingency and capacity-reservation paths by design. See the path-utilisation methodology for how scheduled, activated, and ghost paths are derived.

Free-tier: operator-total activation rate and ghost count for Period 2 2026-27. Per-corridor path utilisation, per-path scheduling-pattern analysis, and spot-contract renewal guidance are released to commercial-licence subscribers. The activation rate measures Working-Timetable path-days that materialised as activations — not operator delivery performance against intent. Capacity-reservation paths and contingency optionality in the WTT mean a sub-100% rate is a transparency datum, not a delivery indictment.

Source: BPLAN schedule import and TRUST journey activation feeds, Period 2 2026-27. STP precedence (C > O > N > P) is applied per (train_uid, date) pair via Schedule.effective_for; STP-cancelled path-days are excluded from the denominator. VSTP activations (no Schedule row) are excluded from both numerator and denominator. 90% Wilson interval on the proportion. National FOC mean computed across the known FOC universe in the same window — see path-utilisation methodology.

Schedule 8 net position

Schedule 8 net-position figures depend on Network Rail's Historic Delay Attribution release, which is published roughly four to six weeks after period close. The teaser will update once HDA is ingested. Methodology is published independently of release timing.

Per-corridor and per-day Schedule 8 net-position figures, and the full responsibility-party breakdown, are released to commercial-licence subscribers.

Source: Network Rail Historic Delay Attribution (HDA) for Period 2 2026-27, ingested into delay_attributions with source: "trust". CP7 rates are published by ORR and applied uniformly across all operators. See delay-attribution methodology.

Delay attribution party split

Delay-attribution party breakdowns depend on Network Rail's Historic Delay Attribution release, which is published roughly four to six weeks after period close. The teaser will update once HDA is ingested. Methodology is published independently of release timing.

Cause-code level breakdowns and per-corridor decomposition are released to commercial-licence subscribers.

Source: Network Rail Historic Delay Attribution (HDA) for Period 2 2026-27. Responsibility parties follow the DAPR mapping in the delay_attribution_codes table. See delay-attribution methodology.

Commercial licence

Four derivations are released to commercial-licence subscribers rather than the public archive. Each one reconciles TRUST source-data against Network Rail's Historic Delay Attribution record independently, not republished from public statistics.

• Schedule 8 net position
• Why late — delay attribution
• Schedule 4 possession exposure
• Path utilisation — corridor breakdown

Available under commercial licence. Contact [email protected] for subscription terms.

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