national express East Anglia (NXEA) railway punctuality
The following is an analysis of the punctuality of national express East Anglia railway Mainline services between Witham in Essex and London Liverpool Street station. 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 14/11/2011. I recorded the actual arrival times and these are then compared to the scheduled times in the national express East Anglia railway timetable.
Statistical summary
| Overall | 13 week | 4 week | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of journeys | 1599 | 36 | 16 |
| On time or early | 643 | 6 | 1 |
| 1 to 4 minutes late | 487 | 18 | 7 |
| 5 or more minutes late | 469 | 12 | 8 |
| on time (real) | 40.2 % | 16.7 % | 6.2 % |
| on time (passengers charter) | 70.7 % | 66.7 % | 50.0 % |
| Total lateness | 117 hours 52 mins (7072 min) |
4 hours 19 mins (259 min) |
1 hours 55 mins (115 min) |
| Mean minutes late per journey | 4 min 25 sec | 7 min 11 sec | 7 min 11 sec |
Disappointingly, of the 956 journeys that did not arrive on time, only 113 had (on-train, audible) announcements as to what was the cause of the lateness (11.8 % ).
Overall lateness
The total number of minutes late over 1599 journeys was 7072 . The punctuality (as defined in the passengers' charter as percentage of trains arriving within five minutes of the advertised time) was 70.7 % (overall) or 50.0 % (last 4 weeks), to be compared with national express East Anglia railway's passengers' charter target of 88 %.
Distribution of arrival times
Correspondence with national express East Anglia railway and delay-repay compensation
I decided to write to 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
- national express East Anglia railway's site
- national express East Anglia railway's online performance bar page
- 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
