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Notes to editors

* 71% of delays to Virgin services were attributable to Network Rail during the period with just over half of these down to infrastructure problems such as overhead line and track faults. The remainder were caused by external factors, such as fatalities, operational management, delays caused by other TOCs and just 12.3% by Virgin trains themselves

Network Rail would like to apologise to all its customers and passengers for the unacceptable performance on the southern end of the West Coast Main Line. As a result, Virgin has lodged a claim for additional compensation under the ‘sustained poor performance’ clause in its track access agreement.

To help tackle the performance issue the company has embarked upon a £40m investment programme (announced on Monday) unveiling six work-streams aimed at improving train punctuality on this vital piece of railway infrastructure

• Nationally around 60% of delays to train services are attributed to Network Rail. As well as infrastructure faults, these also include external factors such as weather, trespass and vandalism, cable theft etc, which make-up about 20% of all delays and therefore around a third of the delays attributed to Network Rail
• 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, 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