Southern rail service hits national punctuality figures

Endless problems on train services at Southern are dragging down national punctuality levels, according to the rail regulator.

A report by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) describes overall punctuality and reliability across Britain as "mixed", but generally "poor".

The report covers the period from the start of April until mid-October.

It says the biggest drag on performance is Govia Thameslink Rail (GTR), which operates Southern trains.

Although this is only one franchise, because it carries a fifth of passengers in England and Wales it's big enough to warp the national stats.

All the rail companies are compared using the Public Performance Measure, or PPM. It mixes punctuality and reliability to come up with a percentage. The higher the number, the better the performance.

Adding the latest figures mean that for the year to mid-October, GTR managed a PPM of just 76%. The next worst was Virgin Trains East Coast, on 82.7%.

The best was c2c on 95.3%. The average across England and Wales was 87.7%, which is some way shy of the 92.5% it's meant to achieve by March 2019.

It's currently 89.5% in Scotland, which has the same 2019 target.

Plethora of problems

While I'm dishing out the stats, I've got one more for you, but it's a goody. It all adds up to 454,594 late trains in Britain over the past 6 months. So, presumably, about a million a year then.

GTR has suffered from a cocktail of issues. On-board guards have been periodically on-strike since April, over changes to their role. The report also talks about "a significant increase in sickness amongst these staff".

It goes on to say, "this makes the service harder to operate even when there are no other problems on the network, and when an incident does occur recovering the service is much harder. So, while Network Rail is responsible for 58% of delay minutes impacting GTR services, this is being made worse by GTR's train crew problems."

Best performer c2c connects London to Tilbury and Southend, in Essex

Strike action and staff sickness are merely compounding other problems on differing parts of the franchise.

Network Rail is rebuilding London Bridge station to make way for a much-improved Thameslink service. But - and this is the understatement of the year - the work was more disruptive than anyone realised.

Experts predicted 10,000 delay minutes per year. In reality, it's caused 10,000 delay minutes per week.

Couple that with a shortage of drivers and you get Britain's worst rail service.

Some positives

The ORR report does have some positive things to say about Network Rail.

Health and safety performance is good. Renewal plans are ahead of target. And it's reached seven out of eight project delivery milestones, although that's after the new chairman had to scale back their ambitions earlier this year because they were slipping so far behind and so over budget.

Network Rail is also likely to miss the next delivery target for electrifying the line between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The company had a big boost from Wednesday's Autumn Statement. It's been handed a £450m cheque to put in digital signals, which should make the whole network much more efficient.