Greater Anglia (GA) railway punctuality
The following is an analysis of the punctuality of Greater Anglia railway Mainline services between Witham in Essex and London Liverpool Street station. After a hiatus of a couple of years, largely because I was working abroad and not using GA, I have now started colleting statistics again. Most of my journeys these days are between Witham and Stratford, with occasional trips to Liverpool street and very occasional other intermediate station trips.
The statistics below represent my journeys taken between 24/07/2006 and 16/02/2016. I recorded the actual arrival times and these are then compared to the scheduled times in the Greater Anglia railway timetable.
Statistical summary
Overall | 1 Year | 13 week | 4 week | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Number of journeys | 1913 | 108 | 25 | 15 |
On time or early | 765 | 51 | 9 | 6 |
1 to 4 minutes late | 577 | 32 | 8 | 4 |
5 or more minutes late | 571 | 25 | 8 | 5 |
on time (real) | 40.0 % | 47.2 % | 36.0 % | 40.0 % |
on time (passengers charter) | 70.2 % | 76.9 % | 68.0 % | 66.7 % |
Total lateness | 142 hours 43 mins (8563 min) |
9 hours 56 mins (596 min) |
4 hours 52 mins (292 min) |
3 hours 48 mins (228 min) |
Mean minutes late per journey | 4 min 28 sec | 5 min 31 sec | 11 min 40 sec | 15 min 12 sec |
Disappointingly, of the 1148 journeys that did not arrive on time, only 132 had (on-train, audible) announcements as to what was the cause of the lateness (11.5 % ).
Overall lateness
Individual journeys
One Year
All Time
Moving Averages
One Year
All Time
Summary
The total number of minutes late over 1913 journeys was 8563 . The punctuality (as defined in the passengers' charter as percentage of trains arriving within five minutes of the advertised time) was 70.2 % (overall) or 66.7 % (last 4 weeks), to be compared with what used to be the passengers' charter target of 88 %. I can't find the current PPM target figure online anywhere - perhaps targets been done away with? I have asked the good folk at @greateranglia via Twitter. The latest claimed PPM performance by GA was 92.65 % at time of writing.
Distribution of arrival times
One Year, 13 Week and 4 week Distributions
All Time Distribution
Correspondence
I decided to write to Greater Anglia's predecessor, national express East Anglia once my total delays got to 8 hours. Further information is on the correspondence page
Updates
The updates have moved to their own page.
Links
- Greater Anglia's own figures for their performance
- www.delay-repay.com, a site which helps passengers track late national express East Anglia trains and claim delay repay compensation
- A relevant BBC article from earlier in the year
- Some older stuff from the BBC: they ran a number of columns by their "Commuters' Champion", Jon Yuill, Whose commute is also, coincidentally, from Witham to London:
- An older article from The Times comparing UK and Swiss rail punctuality
- The Swiss national railway's online punctuality graphs
Definitions (the small print)
The following definitions/rules were used:-
- Times were rounded to the nearest minute (e.g.. a train 28 seconds late was recorded as on time whilst a train 32 seconds late was recorded as one minute late)
- Arrival times were recorded at the point when the train had come to rest and the doors unlocked
- My watch was used, which I checked (and synchronised when necessary) against Liverpool St. station's main clock
- Where a train that I was in time to catch was cancelled, or running sufficiently late to be behind another train I ended up catching, the departure time of the original train was used for my departure time, regardless of the train I actually ended up travelling on