East Coast Main Line — Period 1 2026-27 (29 March – 25 April) report
East Coast Main Line recorded 78% A2F punctuality in Period 1 2026-27 (29 Mar – 25 Apr 2026) on 2,152 freight services, down 1 percentage point from 79% in Period 13 2025-26 on a smaller denominator. The intervals overlap with the prior period.
- Edition
- v1.0 (industry review edition)
- Last updated
- 25 April 2026
- Next update
- Period 2 2026-27 — final on 24 May 2026
Headline facts and figures
Services monitored
2,152
Journeys traversing the ECML corridor between 29 March and 25 April 2026; corridor-attributed; baseline 2,659 services in Period 13 2025-26, see data-window methodology
A2F punctuality
78%
90% Wilson interval 76%–79%, 2,152 services; baseline 79% (78%–81%) over 2,659 services in Period 13 2025-26 — ranges overlap; queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-28
Change on prior period
−1 percentage point
Headline A2F down 1 percentage point on Period 13 2025-26; intervals overlap with the prior period, so the move sits within plausible sampling variation, see league-table methodology; queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-28
Cancellations
—
Cancellation breakdown panel below reports corridor cancellations for Period 1 2026-27
Context
ORR publishes no corridor-level freight performance; this page publishes operator-by-operator standings on the ECML. Material to FOCs bidding for ECML paths and to Network Rail's East Coast route performance team.
What you can do with it
- See every operator's ECML rank for the period, with partial-pool stabilisation for small samples.
- Quantify the corridor's CP7 exposure window.
- Cite the methodology, not a vendor's number, in negotiations.
Who can use it
Freight operations leaders · Track-access negotiators · East Coast route performance · Rail journalists
What this page measures
The page makes three things possible. Every shared corridor is ranked: an operator's A2F sits next to active peer freight operators on that corridor, with a 90% interval around each figure. A period's CP7 exposure is computed from the operator's own services rather than national aggregates. The methodology behind each figure is named, dated, and reproducible, so track-access negotiations and academic citations can reference the published method rather than a vendor's number.
The East Coast Main Line carried 2,152 freight services between 29 March and 25 April 2026 (Period 1 of the 2026-27 rail year). Figures aggregate every monitored journey that traversed at least one of the corridor's 12 monitoring points, drawn from Network Rail's NROD/TRUST feed. This is the second published period for the ECML; the prior period (Period 13 2025-26) carried 2,659 services at 79% A2F. The ECML connects London Kings Cross to Edinburgh via Peterborough, Doncaster, York and Newcastle — the principal east-coast freight artery for intermodal traffic out of Doncaster iPort and bulk traffic between the Yorkshire coalfields, Tyneside, and the Scottish central belt.
What changed since Period 13 2025-26
Corridor A2F punctuality stood at 78% over 2,152 services, with a 90% Wilson interval of 76%–79%. The headline share is 1 percentage point below the 79% recorded in Period 13 2025-26, and the intervals overlap with the prior period — the change sits within plausible sampling variation. Services monitored fell by 507 on the prior period; the corridor-attributed figure does not separate timetable change, traffic mix, or absent operators from underlying corridor performance, and this report does not attribute the movement to a specific cause.
Daily on-time arrivals across Period 1 2026-27
Daily on-time arrivals are down 1.8 percentage points on Period 13 2025-26 (78% then, 76% now).
Range 63%–84% across 28 days. Weekend mean 72% vs weekday 78% (-5.9 percentage points). Mean 76%.
Period 1 2026-27 daily A2F averaged 77% across 28 observations. Day-to-day variation was consistent with a stable process — no statistical-signal rule triggered.
Mean punctuality in Period 13 2025-26 was 78%. The current period is down 1.8 percentage points on Period 13 2025-26.
Source: Gauge Intelligence NROD-derived journey data, Period 1 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 1 2026-27, 6% of scheduled services were cancelled (126 of 2259) — within the national mean of 7%; FOC traction, crew, and terminal decisions accounted for the largest share.
Cancellations are down 3.90 percentage points on Period 13 2025-26 (10% then, 6% now). The largest shifts in the responsible-party split are reported in the table below.
| Scheduled or activated paths | 2,259 |
| Cancelled (post-activation + pre-activation) | 126 |
| Cancellation rate | 6% 5%–6% |
| National cancellation rate (all freight) | 7% |
Attribution
| Responsible party | Cancellations | Share of cancelled |
|---|---|---|
| Network Rail infrastructure and possessions | 12 | 10% |
| FOC traction, crew, and terminal decisions | 100 | 79% |
| Third party | 1 | 1% |
| Unattributed | 13 | 10% |
Cancellation rate in Period 13 2025-26 was 10% across 2,905 scheduled paths. The current period is down 3.90 percentage points on Period 13 2025-26.
Source: NROD/TRUST activation feed and BPLAN scheduled paths, Period 1 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.
What the 15-minute threshold hides
Half of Period 1 2026-27 services arrived within +5 min of timetable. The long tail the A2F binary misses: 5% of services ran +48 min or more late, and 1% arrived over +106 min late. The 15-minute A2F threshold sits at the 78th percentile — 22% of services exceeded it.
Median arrival delay is essentially unchanged on Period 13 2025-26 (5 min then, 5 min now).
| Percentile | Arrival delay |
|---|---|
| 50th percentile (median) — A2F threshold sits at the 78th percentile | +5 min |
| 75th percentile — A2F threshold sits at the 78th percentile | +14 min |
| 85th percentile | +23 min |
| 90th percentile | +32 min |
| 95th percentile | +48 min |
| 99th percentile | +106 min |
2,133 services with confirmed terminal arrival in Period 1 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: 100 min.
Baseline (Period 13 2025-26): median +5 min, p99 +112 min. Period-on-period median shift +0 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.
Operator activity on East Coast Main Line
Operator ranking on East Coast Main Line for Period 1 2026-27 is deferred while the v1.0 industry review edition corrections inbox remains open. Publishing a corridor-level ranking against named operators before the launch-cohort corrections cycle closes would treat provisional figures as settled. The ranking returns at v2.0 general availability.
The framework the panel uses — partial-pool shrinkage toward the corridor mean, with rank order taken from the pooled estimate rather than the raw observed rate — is documented at league-table methodology. The schedule for v2.0 general availability is at release cadence.
Source: Gauge Intelligence NROD-derived journey data, Period 1 2026-27. Per-operator counts and single-operator A2F on this corridor continue to appear in the corridor performance panels above; the corridor-internal ranking against peers is the panel deferred here.
Path utilisation
Ran 1,353 of 5,260 booked paths (26%, 90% Wilson 25%–27%) on East Coast Main Line in Period 1 2026-27. 3,907 ghost paths (booked, not run).
In plain terms: a booked path is a freight slot reserved in Network Rail's Working Timetable that traverses this corridor's monitoring chain. A run path is a booked path that activated and produced a journey segment on the corridor. A ghost path is a booked slot that produced no corridor traversal — 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.
| Booked paths (non-STP-cancelled) | 5,260 |
| Run | 1,353 |
| Ghost paths | 3,907 |
| Activation rate | 26% 25%–27% |
Baseline (baseline) activation rate 33% across 5,481 booked paths; period-on-period delta -7.6pp.
Free tier: corridor-wide activation rate and ghost count for Period 1 2026-27. Per-operator decomposition and per-path scheduling-pattern analysis are released to commercial-licence subscribers.
Source: BPLAN schedule import and TRUST journey activation feeds, Period 1 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 booked count.
VSTP activations (no Schedule row) are excluded from both numerator and denominator.
The UID universe for "booked on this corridor" is FreightService UIDs that have ever produced
a journey segment on this corridor; see
path-utilisation methodology.
90% Wilson interval on the proportion.
Schedule 8 net position
Bilateral Schedule 8 settlement runs at two rates under CP7: operators pay Network Rail £51.98 per minute of operator-attributed delay; Network Rail pays operators £25.81 per minute of NR-attributed delay. The asymmetry produces a net position on every period for every operator; its sign and size depend on the period's bilateral delay-minute mix at rates that do not move within a control period.
The bilateral net position for Period 1 2026-27 on services on the East Coast Main Line corridor, together with the per-corridor decomposition, the rate-gap counterfactual against an equal-rate benchmark, and the period-on-period swing, is released to commercial-licence subscribers.
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 1 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
Across 210 attribution rows totalling 3,225 delay minutes in Period 1 2026-27 for services on the East Coast Main Line corridor, Network Rail carries 33%, operators carry 56%, and third parties carry 12% of the attributed delay minutes.
Network Rail's share of attributed minutes is down 6.9 percentage points on Period 13 2025-26 (40% then, 33% now). Operator share moved up 11.0 percentage points alongside — the bilateral mix of attributed minutes shifted, not the total volume of delay.
| Responsible party | Delay minutes | Share of minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Network Rail | 1,050 | 33% |
| Operator | 1,801 | 56% |
| Third party | 374 | 12% |
Baseline (Period 13 2025-26): NR 40%, operator 45%, third party 16%. Period-on-period NR share shift -6.9 percentage points.
Cause-code level breakdowns and per-corridor decomposition are released to commercial-licence subscribers.
Source: Network Rail Historic Delay Attribution (HDA) for Period 1 2026-27.
Responsibility parties follow the DAPR mapping in the delay_attribution_codes table.
See delay-attribution methodology.
What this page does not measure
Pre-activation cancellations fall outside the dataset: TRUST requires an activation event before it records a journey, so services cancelled before activation produce no TRUST record. VSTPs are excluded from the path-utilisation denominator because no Working Timetable row exists against which to measure them. Journeys without a confirmed terminal arrival are excluded from the delay distribution. The 15-minute A2F threshold is a regulatory artefact, not a natural cut-off — the "What the 15-minute threshold hides" panel surfaces the distribution behind that line.
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
Methodology
Corridor-level A2F punctuality is measured at the ECML's 12 monitoring points spanning the London-to-Edinburgh route. A service is counted on time if it arrives at the terminal within fifteen minutes of schedule. The 90% confidence interval on each share uses the Wilson score method on the observed denominator. Severity bands across panels apply consistent thresholds: an SPC run-rule trigger on the daily series flags a day as anomalous, and gaps between operator rankings of more than 10 percentage points raise the peer panel into the alert band. See the anomaly-detection methodology for the SPC rules.
Operator rankings on the ECML aggregate per operator via TRUST toc_id across every corridor segment traversal in the window, then apply partial-pool shrinkage so small-sample operators stabilise toward the corridor mean. Cross-view reconciliation across the four views (by operator, by destination, by flow, by corridor) is documented in the league-table methodology. Period boundaries and the data-as-of cutoff are documented in the data-window methodology. Data derives from Network Rail's NROD TRUST feed, processed via the Gauge Intelligence NROD pipeline.
The corridor's Schedule 8 net position, the Network Rail / freight-operator delay-attribution breakdown, the per-operator and per-path-quality ghost-path decomposition, the per-operator path-utilisation detail, and Schedule 4 possession exposure for the ECML are released to commercial-licence subscribers. The intraday A2F pattern panel is deferred for corridor pages pending the segment-attributed intraday model; this exclusion is disclosed here per the analytical-rigour discipline applied across published pages.
Regulatory context
Network Rail's Control Period 7 obligation, fixed in ORR's PR23 conclusions, imposes a 1.3% target on the Freight Cancellations and Lateness (FCaL) metric by March 2029. A2F is the operator-perspective version of the same threshold: the cancellation-plus-lateness measure that drives the obligation. ORR's Freight rail usage and performance release records that its statistical publications do not compare results against targets. This page does, against the CP7 target and over time.
Revisions
No revisions to date.
A revision restates a published figure because the upstream data changed, typically a Network Rail delay-attribution refresh. The minor tier is corrected in the next release; cells affected carry an (r) flag. The intermediate tier triggers immediate amendment with an (r) flag. The wholesale tier is flagged at the top of the page and notified directly to operators and rail journalists subscribed to revision alerts.
Corrections
No corrections to date.
A correction fixes an error in the published output: an arithmetic slip, a typo, a mis-rendered chart. Revisions are different; they restate a figure because the upstream data changed. The distinction matters because corrections never silently rewrite a published number.