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BBC Reporting Scotland, STV News and most of Scotland’s newspapers are alive with hysterical accounts of a crisis in Scotland’s railway system after a single incident in Edinburgh last Thursday. Already the First Minister has felt obliged to apologise and Transport Minister, Humza Yousef, has faced calls to resign from Unionist politicians. Needless to say the mainstream media reports have been utterly devoid of facts or context. Look at the table below and you’ll see that the commonly used measure of train punctuality ‘also known as PPM (public performance measure) means trains arriving at their terminating station within five minutes for commuter services and within 10 minutes for long distance services’, for ScotRail, has actually been better than the average for the UK as a whole and has improved on the figure for 2015/16.
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Performance by train operator
The table below shows the average PPM for Britain as a whole and by train operating company. The moving annual average is calculated over the 365 days to 12 November.
| Train Operating Company | PPM % period 8, 2015/16 | PPM % period 8, 2016/17 | PPM Moving annual average (MAA) |
| Abellio Greater Anglia | 86.0 | 86.8 | 89.2 |
| Arriva Trains Wales | 90.1 | 88.6 | 91.7 |
| c2c Rail | 96.5 | 93.3 | 95.0 |
| Caledonian Sleeper | 83.2 | 87.4 | 86.2 |
| Chiltern | 92.8 | 93.2 | 93.1 |
| Crosscountry | 85.1 | 86.5 | 89.6 |
| East Midlands Trains | 89.5 | 87.5 | 92.2 |
| First Hull Trains | 78.3 | 82.4 | 83.2 |
| Transpennine Express | 75.0 | 88.1 | 87.6 |
| Govia Thameslink Railway | 74.2 | 69.9 | 75.6 |
| Grand Central | 83.3 | 85.9 | 84.7 |
| Great Western Railway | 85.0 | 85.0 | 89.1 |
| Heathrow Express | 90.1 | 90.6 | 90.9 |
| London Midland | 83.6 | 85.7 | 89.1 |
| London Overground | 92.5 | 94.8 | 94.7 |
| Merseyrail | 93.4 | 94.5 | 95.3 |
| Northern | 84.3 | 88.5 | 91.2 |
| ScotRail | 83.3 | 87.0 | 89.8 |
| Southeastern | 82.3 | 84.4 | 86.3 |
| Stagecoach South West Trains | 86.8 | 85.5 | 88.3 |
| TfL Rail | 94.8 | 94.9 | 94.2 |
| Virgin Trains East Coast | 80.3 | 80.9 | 82.7 |
| Virgin Trains West Coast | 86.4 | 90.5 | 87.1 |
| Total England & Wales Performance | 84.3 | 85.1 | 87.9 * |
*The total label above is just another piece of Anglo-centrism by some anonymous website data entry assistant and is the UK figure as indicated at the top of the table.
Strangely, the Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, has not been called upon to resign despite the appalling record of Westminster’s local line, Govia Thameslink Railway, with only 69.9% of trains arriving on or near on-time. ‘Govia?’ What does that remind me of? Is the Right Dishonourable Michael Gove on the board there?
Source:
Talking-up Scotland 
I wait with bated breath to hear you on GMS at 6am tomorrow putting the record straight – oh and while you’re on can you ask for the heads of certain members of the reporting Labour team to roll for broadcasting inaccuracies – again.
In the meantime I’ve sent a link to your piece to my 3 SNP MSP’s urging them to up their act.
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Cheers BB. Good idea to share. SNP pretty timid on this? GMS? No way. I have a sensitive…..everything.
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If the totals shown in the chart really were for England & Wales (as the chart states) they would have been even lower – the inclusion of the Scotrail figures improves them noticeably. But will there be headlines such as “Scots Trains Out-perform Most South of Border”? I doubt it.
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Thanks Michael. Good point.
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No resignation call for Transport Secretary Chris Grayling yet frenzy of such calls for Humza Yousef
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/southern-rail-operator-could-escape-losing-the-contract-because-the-department-for-transport-will-a7441206.html
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