Margam Steel Terminal
Last updated 25 May 2026
Heavy-haul rail terminal serving Tata Steel's Port Talbot integrated works in South Wales. Iron-ore, coal, and steel-product flows between Port Talbot Docks, Llanwern, Scunthorpe, and the Margam yard. Carried almost exclusively by DB Cargo.
| Operating company | Tata Steel UK (Port Talbot works) |
| Commodity | Iron ore, coking coal, steel coil, slab |
| Active since | Rail connection long-established; current terminal configuration post-1950s integrated works |
| Rail connectivity | Margam East Junction on the South Wales Main Line; private sidings into the works |
| TIPLOC footprint |
MRGMTC
(Margam Heol-y-Deliad terminal (principal reception))
MRGMTCG
(Margam TC GBRf reception sidings)
MRGMEJ
(Margam East Junction)
|
| Carrier mix |
DB Cargo
(98%)
GB Railfreight
(2%)
|
| Trailing 12-period A2F | Inaugural data window — per-period reliability figures from P1 2026-27 onwards. |
Latest period summary
Margam Steel Terminal handled 89 monitored inbound services and 110 monitored outbound services in Period 2 2026-27. Inbound arrivals read 94% within 15 minutes of schedule against a national freight benchmark of 90%; outbound services read 94% within 15 minutes. The +9 percentage-point move on Period 1 2026-27 inbound and the flat 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
Margam is the rail terminal that serves Tata Steel’s Port Talbot integrated steelworks in South Wales. The yard lies on the South Wales Main Line immediately east of Port Talbot Parkway and handles the iron-ore and coal flows that feed the blast furnaces, together with finished-product steel coil traffic to onward customers.
Activity window
Across the 90 days to 25 May 2026 the published archive observed 489 inbound and 519 outbound journeys at the Margam cluster (queried gauge_intelligence_v2 at 2026-05-25, 90-day window). DB Cargo carried around 98% of journeys; the small balance ran under GB Railfreight. 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.