BEST JULY TRAIN PUNCTUALITY FOR OVER A DECADE

Monday 3 Aug 2009

BEST JULY TRAIN PUNCTUALITY FOR OVER A DECADE

Region & Route:: National

July saw 92.4% of trains arriving on time across Great Britain making it the best July since records began over a decade ago.

In its fourth regular monthly performance update, Network Rail announced that period four, 28 June to 25 July, proved to be a record month compared to the same period every year since the detailed records of train performance began in 1997 / 98.

Reporting on period four of the year, 92.4% of services ran to time compared to 92.3% last year. This resulted in the average number of trains on time over the last 12 months maintaining its best ever level of 90.9%.

In all, 11 operators saw their performance improve, compared to the same period last year. One remained unchanged and seven dropped but all by marginal amounts. Only one operator saw significant movement in their performance (over three percentage points):

Operator: Virgin Trains
P4 2009: 86.4%
P4 2008: 77.3%
% point change: +9.1

Robin Gisby, director of operations and customer service, said: "Train punctuality is being maintained at historically high levels and our extra investment targeted at improving performance on the west coast main line is seeing early signs of success.

"Our focus remains on driving up performance for Virgin and the other operators on the west coast."

Performance for Virgin Trains continues on an upward trend, significantly ahead of last's year's period four, and up on last month (period three [June] PPM was 82.3%). Performance remains ahead of our joint improvement plan approved by the regulator in May

Notes to editors

1) 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 for long distance services. This measure of punctuality is commonly used throughout Europe 2) A graph attached to this press release charts period four performance since records began in 1997/8 3) National train punctuality is measured for all trains across every day, 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 4) These figures represent provisional data for the period and individuals operators performance data may vary slightly from the full period performance report that Network rail publishes on its website around one month after period end 5) Network Rail and the train operators run more trains across Great Britain than are run in most European countries - 50% more than in France and 60% more than operate in Italy for example. The UK's 24,000 trains per-day is also more than Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Portugal and Norway combined

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