OREANDA-NEWS. Punctuality on the railways reached 93.1% during Period 3, according to monthly performance data released by Network Rail, the joint best period 3 recorded.

The data for Britain's train services covers the period from 26 May 2013 - 22 June 2013. This compares to 92.9% for the same period last year. The moving annual average is now at 91.0%.

Franchise

Punctuality %

Period 3, 2013/14

Punctuality %

Period 3, 2012/13

Moving annual average (MAA)

Arriva Trains Wales

95.0

95.3

93.5

c2c Rail

97.8

97.9

97.3

Chiltern

95.1

94.6

95.2

Crosscountry

91.1

89.7

87.3

East Coast

87.8

90.5

83.9

East Midlands Trains

93.3

94.0

92.5

First Capital Connect

91.3

89.9

88.6

First Great Western

92.1

92.2

89.1

First Scotrail

90.9

94.2

92.6

First Transpennine Express

92.4

92.6

91.9

Greater Anglia

94.5

93.2

92.7

London Midland

88.5

91.0

85.6

London Overground

97.1

94.1

96.8

Merseyrail

96.6

98.3

95.6

Northern Rail

92.9

93.3

90.6

Southeastern

94.8

92.7

91.3

Southern

93.1

90.9

88.1

South West Trains

94.3

93.2

91.8

Virgin Trains *

84.5

88.8

83.4

Total

93.1

92.9

91.0

• 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