• Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

Curious: Number of trains

N

NealG

Member
Joined
6 May 2019
Messages
9
For no reason beyond curiosity does anybody know how many trains are out and about on the network at any moment in time?

Clearly this will vary drastically over time of day and day of week, and to some extent from one month to another.
I'm guessing that sleepers stops the number of passenger services from dropping to zero most nights.
Does freight stop on Christmas day so the total number (passenger, empty moves, freight) ever get to zero?

(I don't think that any of the various websites publishes this particular set of info - happy to be proved wrong!)
 
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

S

stadler

Established Member
Joined
5 Jun 2023
Messages
1,762
Location
Horsley
NealG said:
For no reason beyond curiosity does anybody know how many trains are out and about on the network at any moment in time?

Clearly this will vary drastically over time of day and day of week, and to some extent from one month to another.
I'm guessing that sleepers stops the number of passenger services from dropping to zero most nights.
Does freight stop on Christmas day so the total number (passenger, empty moves, freight) ever get to zero?

(I don't think that any of the various websites publishes this particular set of info - happy to be proved wrong!)
Click to expand...
Christmas Day always has two class 387 trains doing Heathrow Airport shuttles. One 387 does T123 to T4 all day. One 387 does T123 to T5 all day. So even on Christmas Day there are at least two trains running so the number is never zero.
 
S

swt_passenger

Veteran Member
Joined
7 Apr 2010
Messages
33,094
Although commercial freight decreases over Christmas, infrastructure maintenance trains fill the space, as it’s usually very much a peak period for Network Rail to do engineering work.
 
N

NealG

Member
Joined
6 May 2019
Messages
9
stadler said:
Christmas Day always has two class 387 trains doing Heathrow Airport shuttles. One 387 does T123 to T4 all day. One 387 does T123 to T5 all day. So even on Christmas Day there are at least two trains running so the number is never zero.
Click to expand...
Those shifts sounds like a lot of walking constantly changing ends!
 
Horizon22

Horizon22

Established Member
Associate Staff
Jobs & Careers
Joined
8 Sep 2019
Messages
9,572
Location
London
In the last period (4 weeks), over 600,000 trains were planned to run. 2.9% of these were cancelled* : https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/how-we-work/performance/railway-performance/

You could just divide the number by 28 which gives you around 22,200 each day, but that doesn't account for Saturdays and particularly Sundays which will be less and also start of day, peak times and end of day which will also be less/more than the average.

There is no particularly easy way to calculate how many trains are running at any one time. I'm sure some coder could work it out though as there are some ways to see what an individual company is currently running.

Last 4 weeks: 02 March 2025 – 31 March 2025​

Number of recorded stations stops – 7,012,797

Passenger Trains Planned – 621,322
Click to expand...

*NR's only figures considered cancelled that might actually run (i.e didn't stop at certain stations / ran fast / terminated short). So this isn't reliable enough to remove fully from the data.
 
Last edited:
Metrolink

Metrolink

Member
Joined
20 Jan 2021
Messages
202
Location
Manchester
So with 621,000 in a four week period, around 15 planned journeys to a minute by simple division. But obviously that could be viewed as 15 journeys start every minute on average - albeit a very flawed statistic and unrepresentative of how many running on the network.

A better statistic is that 22,190 trains run on average per day according to the NR statistics provided by @Horizon22
 
tfw756rider

tfw756rider

Member
Joined
30 Nov 2024
Messages
479
Location
Wales
Well, there are almost 4000 units, and a large proportion of those will be in use on a given day, but also some of them will be working in multi, further reducing the number of trains in use.
 
R

Route115?

Member
Joined
26 Jun 2021
Messages
325
Location
Ruislip
How you define in service? I would imagine away from the deposit and including trains in platforms, but if a train stables in a platform for two hours does it count?

Its actually quite easy to do for LUL - at least for timetabled, maybe not so actual - the working timetable are available to download and they give times that units enter and exit service and no units run in multiple. Much harder for National Rail.
 
rwblake

rwblake

Member
Joined
21 Feb 2024
Messages
5
Location
Worcestershire
If you were to only count passenger services between their first departure and final arrival on a service on National Rail, you would get the following for w.c. 19th May (data from RealTimeTrains API):
Monday - Max of 1806 services, at 080400, min of 28 services, at 032300.
Tuesday - Max of 1811 services, at 080400, min of 24 services, at 031100.
Wednesday - Max of 1811 services, at 080400, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Thursday - Max of 1810 services, at 080500, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Friday - Max of 1807 services, at 080400, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Saturday - Max of 1594 services, at 110500, min of 31 services, at 022200.
Sunday - Max of 1250 services, at 163300, min of 21 services, at 030700.
It's not clear how to easily obtain data for other services (i.e. non-passenger), so they're not included.
 

Attachments

  • numer_of_trains.png
    numer_of_trains.png
    90.1 KB · Views: 38
tfw756rider

tfw756rider

Member
Joined
30 Nov 2024
Messages
479
Location
Wales
rwblake said:
If you were to only count passenger services between their first departure and final arrival on a service on National Rail, you would get the following for w.c. 19th May (data from RealTimeTrains API):
Monday - Max of 1806 services, at 080400, min of 28 services, at 032300.
Tuesday - Max of 1811 services, at 080400, min of 24 services, at 031100.
Wednesday - Max of 1811 services, at 080400, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Thursday - Max of 1810 services, at 080500, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Friday - Max of 1807 services, at 080400, min of 21 services, at 031100.
Saturday - Max of 1594 services, at 110500, min of 31 services, at 022200.
Sunday - Max of 1250 services, at 163300, min of 21 services, at 030700.
It's not clear how to easily obtain data for other services (i.e. non-passenger), so they're not included.
Click to expand...
Wow, so only about half the number of units :o
 
rwblake

rwblake

Member
Joined
21 Feb 2024
Messages
5
Location
Worcestershire
tfw756rider said:
Wow, so only about half the number of units :o
Click to expand...
There's probably some flaws to the counting (I'm not sure if splitting/joining services were handled properly), but it appears so yes. But if you assume say 20% of the time the unit is sitting idle and on average a train is 1.5 units then that would be a peak of 1811*1.5/0.8 = 3400 units. They will never all be in use. Some will be in for repairs etc.
 
N

NealG

Member
Joined
6 May 2019
Messages
9
Many thanks for doing that research - fascinating results and I suspect rather a lot of work to calculate.

Curious differences across Mon to Fri - but I'm NOT asking for you to investigate!!

So the headline takeaways for me are peak is a little over 1800 shortly after 8am on weekdays and a bigger than I would have guessed low of just over 20 services around 03:10

Thanks again!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Top