Rail performance: survey reveals work still needed for passengers

04 February 2026

While plans continue to move at pace to reform Britain’s railways, Transport Focus is continuing to ensure that the industry keeps today’s and future passengers of the railway at the heart of decision making.

Today we’ve published our second set of scorecards using the results of the new Rail Customer Experience Survey. In the last three months in this scorecard more than 50,000 passengers have had their say on their journey. We use this data to present a picture around what passengers really think about their journeys on Britain’s railway to help drive improvements where it matters most.

Overall national passenger satisfaction remains relatively high at 87 per cent (down a fraction from 88 per cent in our last scorecard). However, there are clearly parts of the network and issues where more needs to be done.

At the top end of the scale Hull Trains tops the train operator table, improving by two percentage points from the previous quarter (up from 92 per cent to 94 per cent). This was likely linked to improvements in perceptions of value for money (up from 68 per cent to 73 per cent) and punctuality (up from 86 per cent to 90 per cent) – both key passenger priorities. Merseyrail, LNER and Transport for Wales also saw slight improvements in overall satisfaction – again all three achieved higher satisfaction with punctuality than in the previous scorecard.  Transport for Wales achieved a six-percentage point rise in punctuality from 82 per cent to 88 per cent, the biggest quarter-on-quarter improvement of any TOC.

CrossCountry is the lowest performing operator according to passengers with 78 per cent satisfaction (down from 82 per cent in the previous scorecard). Satisfaction with punctuality was lower than any other train operator (71 per cent, compared with a sector average of 79 per cent, and ten percentage points down from the previous quarter). It comes as no surprise as CrossCountry’s industry punctuality score dropped from 69% to 61% while their cancellations score got worse (up from 6% to 10%). If CrossCountry wants to see an improvement in its overall satisfaction score it’s critical that it moves the dial on service performance.

Scotland continues to top the table in the Network Rail nations and regions scorecard. Scotland’s Railways scored higher than any other region on every measure on the scorecard and was the only region or route to achieve 90 per cent overall journey satisfaction this quarter.

Network Rail’s Southern region remains the poorest performing region on most scorecard measures and saw a three-percentage point decline in satisfaction with punctuality this quarter.

Overall, across Great Britain punctuality is down from 86 per cent to 83 per cent, driven mainly by a decline in satisfaction in the long-distance sector (down from 83 per cent to 79 per cent). Improving performance remains an area of focus for railway operators and Network Rail. We know that both passenger perceptions of, and performance itself tend to decline in the winter months, but it is clear the industry must do more to prioritise improvements in this area of the passenger experience. It’s important to remember that all the delay minutes and cancellations add up to thousands of late school pickups, get togethers disrupted and vital appointments missed. We will be challenging train operators and Network Rail to share their plans to move this forward with us ahead of our first in-depth Rail Customer Experience Survey report in May.

Despite efforts in recent years, results from the Rail Customer Experience Survey show that disruption handling remains a pain point for passengers. Delay handling remains the lowest rated aspect on the scorecard, at just 48 per cent. Information being clear, concise and consistent plays a key part in a passenger’s experience during disruption and needs further improvement.

Delay handling is very much linked to performance and becomes even more important when punctuality and cancellations are challenging. Passengers rely on the industry to make a frustrating situation better through good information and passenger centric recovery when things go wrong.

As well as carrying out research to better understand what passengers think, over the past year we have worked on the ground with two train operators, Great Western Railway and ScotRail, observing what happens when something goes wrong from both sides of the fence. We observed how things work in control rooms, how decisions were made as operational circumstances changed, while simultaneously monitoring the resulting passenger experience at stations, on trains and online. This put us in a unique position of seeing the industry and passenger perspectives together and helped us identify issues that would not otherwise have been visible.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be engaging with train operators and the wider industry to see how we build on existing initiatives to adopt our recommendations. In the autumn we will invite senior industry leaders to a summit to discuss progress and share best practice on this important topic.

Personal safety on-board also declined in our latest scorecard, from 87 per cent to 85 per cent.  This is clearly an area for improvement and an area where we hope that current industry initiatives will drive improvements. We will be looking as this further with deep dives with passengers in the coming months.

We know that for customers, what matters most is a reliable railway they can depend on, which offers them value for money and is responsive when things go wrong. We’ll be looking at all these factors in much greater detail when we publish the first six-month official stats report for the Rail Customer Experience Survey.