Curious: Number of trains

[NealG]

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!)

 

[stadler]

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!)

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.

 

[swt_passenger]

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.

 

[NealG]

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.

Those shifts sounds like a lot of walking constantly changing ends!

 

[Horizon22]

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

*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.

 

[Metrolink]

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