Drax Power Station
Last updated 25 May 2026
Biomass-fired generating station on the River Ouse north of Selby, North Yorkshire. Inbound wood-pellet trains from the Humber ports (Immingham and Hull biomass terminals) and outbound empties to those ports are the dominant flow. Carried jointly by DB Cargo and GB Railfreight.
| Operating company | Drax Group plc |
| Commodity | Wood pellets (biomass); historic coal flows now closed |
| Active since | 2013 (biomass conversion began; full biomass operation 2018) |
| Rail connectivity | Drax Branch Junction off the Selby line; private terminal sidings on site |
| TIPLOC footprint |
DRAXGBR
(Drax GB Railfreight sidings)
DRAXFHH
(Drax Power Station AES (Freightliner Heavy Haul))
DRAXCEG
(legacy CEGB-era reception (still appears in CORPUS and the active schedule))
DRAXBJ
(Drax Branch Junction (off-network junction TIPLOC))
|
| Carrier mix |
DB Cargo
(53%)
GB Railfreight
(45%)
Freightliner Intermodal
(2%)
|
| Trailing 12-period A2F | Inaugural data window — per-period reliability figures from P1 2026-27 onwards. |
Latest period summary
Drax Power Station handled 151 monitored inbound services and 160 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 88% within 15 minutes. The -3 percentage-point move on Period 1 2026-27 inbound and the +3 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
Origin ports
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
Drax is a biomass-fired generating station on the River Ouse north of Selby, operated by Drax Group. The site converted four of its six units from coal to sustainable biomass (wood pellets) between 2013 and 2018, and rail freight serves it as the principal means of delivering pellets from the Humber import ports.
Activity window
Across the 90 days to 25 May 2026 the published archive observed 645 inbound and 670 outbound journeys at the Drax cluster (queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-25, 90-day window). DB Cargo carried the larger share (around 53% of journeys); GB Railfreight the balance (around 45%). 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.
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.