The data for Britain’s train services covers the period from 1 to 30 April. The period was one of the best on record, although slightly down on last year’s 94.0%

Robin Gisby, director of operations and customer services, said: “A good start to the year sees train performance continue to deliver consistently high levels of punctuality. Our focus remains as we, and the train operators, endeavour to deliver a high performing and reliable railway for almost four million daily users.”

East Coast saw punctuality improve for the fourth period in a row and beat last year’s period one result. If three big external events were excluded from the statistics (fatalities and cable theft) East Coast would have reported train performance of almost 90% as the underlying reliability of the infrastructure and the train fleet continue to improve. Infrastructure issues and external factors continue to dominate delays for East Coast, with the actions put in place to improve underlying performance slowly starting to have an impact.

Arrived on time - the measure of train punctuality also known as PPM (public performance measure) means trains arriving at their destinations within five minutes for commuter services and within 10 minutes for long distance services. This measure of punctuality is commonly used throughout Europe
National train punctuality is measured for all trains across the whole network, including cancelled services and delays caused by external factors (such as vandalism, extreme weather, suicides etc). Punctuality did not start to be recorded in this vigorous and thorough way until 1997. Before then Railtrack, and BR before it, did not measure all services and also excluded external factors and other items from their numbers
These figures represent provisional data for the period and individual operators’ performance data may vary slightly from the full period performance report that Network Rail publishes on its website every month
Network Rail and the train operators run more trains across Great Britain than are run in most European countries - almost 20% more than in France and 60% more than in Italy. Great Britain’s 24,000 trains per-day is also more than Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Norway combined.