Midland Main Line — Period 13 2025-26 (1–28 March) report
Midland Main Line recorded 76% A2F punctuality in Period 13 2025-26 (1–28 Mar 2026) on 1,561 freight services traversing the corridor. Inaugural published period — no prior-period comparator yet.
- Edition
- v1.0 (industry review edition)
- Last updated
- 28 March 2026
- Next update
- Period 1 2026-27 — 28 May 2026
Headline facts and figures
Services monitored
1,561
Journeys traversing the MML corridor between 1 and 28 March 2026; corridor-attributed; inaugural period — no prior comparator, see data-window methodology; queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-28
A2F punctuality
76%
90% Wilson interval 75%–78%, 1,561 services; inaugural Period 13 2025-26 — no prior-period comparator; queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-28
Cancellations
—
Cancellation breakdown panel below reports corridor cancellations for Period 13 2025-26
Inaugural disclosure
Period 13
First published MML period snapshot; no change-on-prior-period comparison is published until Period 1 2026-27 lands alongside; queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-28
Context
ORR publishes no corridor-level freight performance; this page publishes operator-by-operator standings on the MML. Material to FOCs bidding for MML paths and to Network Rail's East Midlands route performance team.
What you can do with it
- See every operator's MML 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 Midlands 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 Midland Main Line carried 1,561 freight services at 76% A2F punctuality (Wilson 90% 75%–78%) between 1 and 28 March 2026 (Period 13 of the 2025-26 rail year). Figures aggregate every monitored journey that traversed at least one of the corridor's 10 monitoring points, drawn from Network Rail's NROD/TRUST feed. Period 13 is the first published MML snapshot; no prior-period comparator is available. The MML runs from London St Pancras through Luton, Bedford, Wellingborough, Kettering, Market Harborough, Leicester, and East Midlands Parkway to Chesterfield and Sheffield, carrying aggregates, intermodal, and steel traffic through the East Midlands. East Midlands Gateway — the inland container terminal near East Midlands Parkway — is the principal destination for intermodal traffic on the corridor.
Daily on-time arrivals across Period 13 2025-26
Range 56%–90% across 28 days. Weekend mean 70% vs weekday 78% (-7.7 percentage points). Mean 75%.
Period 13 2025-26 daily A2F averaged 76% across 28 observations. Day-to-day variation was consistent with a stable process — no statistical-signal rule triggered.
Source: Gauge Intelligence NROD-derived journey data, Period 13 2025-26. 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 13 2025-26, 9% of scheduled services were cancelled (152 of 1703) — within the national mean of 14%; FOC traction, crew, and terminal decisions accounted for the largest share.
| Scheduled or activated paths | 1,703 |
| Cancelled (post-activation + pre-activation) | 152 |
| Cancellation rate | 9% 8%–10% |
| National cancellation rate (all freight) | 14% |
Attribution
| Responsible party | Cancellations | Share of cancelled |
|---|---|---|
| Network Rail infrastructure and possessions | 5 | 3% |
| FOC traction, crew, and terminal decisions | 125 | 82% |
| Third party | 2 | 1% |
| Unattributed | 20 | 13% |
Source: NROD/TRUST activation feed and BPLAN scheduled paths, Period 13 2025-26. 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 13 2025-26 services arrived within +6 min of timetable. The long tail the A2F binary misses: 5% of services ran +58 min or more late, and 1% arrived over +126 min late. The 15-minute A2F threshold sits at the 76th percentile — 24% of services exceeded it.
| Percentile | Arrival delay |
|---|---|
| 50th percentile (median) — A2F threshold sits at the 76th percentile | +6 min |
| 75th percentile — A2F threshold sits at the 76th percentile | +15 min |
| 85th percentile | +26 min |
| 90th percentile | +34 min |
| 95th percentile | +58 min |
| 99th percentile | +126 min |
1,551 services with confirmed terminal arrival in Period 13 2025-26. A2F is binary at 15 minutes — this distribution surfaces what the headline figure does not show. National 99th percentile across all freight operators: 98 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 Midland Main Line
Operator ranking on Midland Main Line for Period 13 2025-26 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 13 2025-26. 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 1,048 of 3,606 booked paths (29%, 90% Wilson 28%–30%) on Midland Main Line in Period 13 2025-26. 2,558 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) | 3,606 |
| Run | 1,048 |
| Ghost paths | 2,558 |
| Activation rate | 29% 28%–30% |
Free tier: corridor-wide activation rate and ghost count for Period 13 2025-26. 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 13 2025-26.
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 13 2025-26 on services on the Midland 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 13 2025-26,
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 1,235 attribution rows totalling 28,288 delay minutes in Period 13 2025-26 for services on the Midland Main Line corridor, Network Rail carries 40%, operators carry 49%, and third parties carry 11% of the attributed delay minutes.
| Responsible party | Delay minutes | Share of minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Network Rail | 11,216 | 40% |
| Operator | 13,908 | 49% |
| Third party | 3,164 | 11% |
Cause-code level breakdowns and per-corridor decomposition are released to commercial-licence subscribers.
Source: Network Rail Historic Delay Attribution (HDA) for Period 13 2025-26.
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 MML's 10 monitoring points spanning the London St Pancras to Sheffield 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 MML 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 MML 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.