Great Western Coffee Shop

An interesting question from a friend:


Let me interpret that ....  here is the Recent Train Times report, last 12 weeks, MKM to SWI

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/passrec.jpg)

So that's 537 services "scheduled" of which 18 were cancelled - a 3.35% train cancellation rate
but ...
both the 12:33 (which is often cancelled because the crew for it is late into Westbury off the train from London) and the 20:22 (which is often cancelled because it on one of the old complicated diagrams) are relatively quiet trains and ones which if cancelled inconvenience fewer passenger.  The worst of all - cancelled 5 times - is the 14:3[45]; not sure why that train is so bad, and it's not one of the busiest either, though the return working IS busy ... anyway ... although the cancellation rate of TRAINS during the week is 3.37%, I would guess that the cancellation rate for PASSENGER JOURNEYS is somewhere between 2.5% and 3.0%.

Is there a source of information that would tell me what that figure is, rather than have me guessing?

I do note that, customer wise, GWR are choosing the least bad trains to cancel.

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As an aside, I have selected Monday to Friday above to generate a followable example; rather sadly, weekend performance on the line is really poor compared to the percentages above.

Also as an aside - I note that the report has 59 rather than 60 scheduled trains shown even though there were 60 days in the period selected.   That's because there is one ASLEF strike day in there when only trains were left in the timetable; as far as the passengers were concerned, the trains that did not run were cancellations.   There are 61 trains showing for the 08:02 - 12 full weeks (it ran on strike day) plus this morning's service.

I don't know of any publicly available source for that information, but I guess it could be extrapolated to some extent from Delay Repay claims (i.e. calculated by TOC staff). For a precise figure you would need to know the intended train (to be)/caught by every intending customer.

A subtle extra statistic based on the above would be by how much time customers are inconvenienced by late notice cancellations e.g. they checked before they travelled to see a train they wanted, set off for the station and the train was subsequently cancelled e.g. a discretionary office worker who could attend a meeting remotely, would prefer to meet in the office, but as a result of the cancellation ended up attending remotely from a station platform.

If you want passenger numbers per train, to do a weighting exercise, those figures are withheld from publication on the grounds on commercial confidentiality. Bogus grounds, I've always thought. The ORR may have them, at least for now. Of course under GBR all railway statistics will their own internal data and we may not get to see even what we can now.

A passenger journey may involve several trains, and if you want to base statistics on that it will be very difficult. Delay repay (and other forms of complaint) only contain a fraction of failed/disrupted journeys, and statistical ridership data can't fill in the gaps as the railway just don't know a lot of the time which rides/tickets make up one passenger journey.