Boulby Mine
Last updated 25 May 2026
ICL UK's potash and polyhalite mine on the North Yorkshire coast east of Saltburn. The deepest mine in the UK; rail-served by Heavy Haul Rail for the inland leg to the customer terminals at Middlesbrough and Tees Dock.
| Operating company | ICL UK (subsidiary of ICL Group Ltd) |
| Commodity | Polyhalite (Polysulphate fertiliser); historic potash |
| Active since | 1973 (mine opened; rail connection operational from first year) |
| Rail connectivity | Boulby branch off the Esk Valley line at Saltburn |
| TIPLOC footprint |
BOULFHH
(Boulby Mine (Freightliner Heavy Haul reception))
BOULBYR
(legacy Boulby Mine record)
|
| Carrier mix |
Heavy Haul Rail
(100%)
|
| Trailing 12-period A2F | Inaugural data window — per-period reliability figures from P1 2026-27 onwards. |
Latest period summary
Boulby handled 38 monitored inbound services and 22 monitored outbound services in Period 2 2026-27. Inbound arrivals read 86% within 15 minutes of schedule against a national freight benchmark of 90%; outbound services read 100% within 15 minutes. The -5 percentage-point move on Period 1 2026-27 inbound and the +6 percentage-point move outbound sit within plausible sampling variation at these denominators; the ranges around each reading overlap. PRELIMINARY at T+2; FINAL re-publication at T+35 after Network Rail's batch correction.
Reports
Carriers active
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
Boulby is ICL UK’s potash and polyhalite mine on the North Yorkshire coast east of Saltburn, the deepest mine in the United Kingdom at around 1,400 metres below ground. The rail terminal at the mine head connects to the Esk Valley line via the Boulby branch and dispatches mineral product to onward terminals at Middlesbrough and Tees Dock.
Activity window
Across the 90 days to 25 May 2026 the published archive observed 260 inbound and 245 outbound journeys at the Boulby cluster (queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-25, 90-day window), all run by Heavy Haul Rail. Per-period reliability data for this site, once a closed-period window is available, will be published in the next quarterly archive edition. Corrections and additions welcomed via [email protected].
Methodology
Carrier and footprint figures are computed from Network Rail TRUST data, attributed by destination and origin TIPLOC. See the league-table methodology for the attribution rules, the data-window methodology for the period boundaries, and the supply-chain entity methodology for the entity classification and bundling rules.
Carrier labels reflect the current operating entity, not the current TRUST attribution. Network Rail issued a distinct toc_id for Heavy Haul Rail in late February 2026 following the 29 January 2026 split of the Freightliner Group, but re-coding of in-flight bulk traffic from the historic Freightliner toc_id is still in progress; at this archive’s published data window the Boulby flow continues to be reported under the legacy code. The label above describes the operator that runs the journey, not the TRUST code under which it appears.
Inaugural data window
This register entry covers identity and rail-freight footprint only. Per-period reliability figures — arrival-to-five-minute pass rate, cancellation rate, intraday pattern — publish from the first full closed rail period that completes under the current attribution model. Until that period closes, footprint counts are the only figures on this page.
Partial carrier attribution
Footprint counts on this page reflect the freight operators whose TRUST activations resolve to this site's TIPLOCs. Movements handled outside the named carriers — internal shunts, non-NROD-reporting operators, or flows attributed to network nodes rather than the site itself — are not captured here. Where the rail-served footprint is shared between several occupiers, the named carrier may not be the contracting party.