Rail and Road Pod

Ep 10: Behind Britain's rail stats

December 23, 2021 Office of Rail and Road Season 2 Episode 10
Rail and Road Pod
Ep 10: Behind Britain's rail stats
Show Notes Transcript

You Tuber, Geoff Marshall takes over the reins as guest host to discuss all things railway stats.

Geoff's joined by guests from the Office of Rail and Road and the Office for Statistics Regulation to learn more about some of the statistics that the Office of Rail and Road produces.

Geoff delves deep into why railway statistics are published by the Office of Rail and Road, how they are used, why they're regulated and talk through some of the findings from the past year.

The Office of Rail and Road is the accredited primary provider of railway industry official stats, to find out more visit orr.gov.uk.

The Office for Statistics Regulation is the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority.  To find out more visit: osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk

To hear from Geoff Marshall, visit his YouTube Channel to see him visit Britain's railway stations: https://t.co/9LtzEcqJCr

ORR RAIL AND ROAD PODCAST

TRANSCRIPT

Geoff Marshall, guest host: Hello. I'm Geoff Marshall. Welcome. Welcome to a very special edition of the Rail and Road Pod. For this episode, I've taken over the reins from Kenny Walker. Thanks for having me on guys for a one off special to discuss all things stats. I would expect nothing less with guests from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) and the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) as well, to learn more about some of the statistics that the ORR produces.

[Music]

Lyndsey Melbourne, Office of Rail and Road: They support transparency, they enable people, organisations to make decisions and to develop insights based on high quality data. Public trust in official statistics is vital and ORR's independence helps to engender this        . An interesting finding, actually, from our Google Analytics showed that users from 142 different countries across the world accessed our data portal over the last year.

Louisa McCutcheon, Office for Statistics Regulation: So statistics influence choices made by so many people. In the rail industry, statistics support decisions around service planning and investment, and for transport users, they can influence decisions about how to make a journey, for example, influencing whether you believe you're getting good value for money or how confident you are that your journey will be pleasant, or that it will run on time.

Jay Symonds, Office of Rail and Road: What we like to do across all our stats, but in these two sets in particular is to link the changes in rail usage with performance. That's because we know that changes in the number of trains and passengers has an impact on how the rail network performs.

[Music ends]

Geoff: The ORR is the accredited primary provider of railway industry official stats and it publishes a range of statistics, including railway performance, usage of both passenger and freight, which you might not have known, passenger experience, finance and safety. We're going to delve deeper into why these stats are reported and how they're used.

Before we start these conversations, you may know if you are here listening to the podcast that on my YouTube channel, I have a whole series of videos called Least Used Stations where a few years ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing what the least used station was in the whole of the country. Then I think over a cup of tea one winter's afternoon, we broke it down into like what's the nearest least used station and we did it by county and before I knew it, I started a whole series of videos where we just visit each least used station by county.

It is just fascinating to go to these places to see what is, or strictly isn't there and rank them and compare them and occasionally we'd bump into a passenger that's at them, and we'd say to them, did you know that you're at one of the lesser used stations or the least used station for this county? Anything like that, anything that's a bit secret or underused or odd because most of these least used stations have very infrequent service, maybe one train a day or one train a week and so that's always a fantastic anomaly, which people like to talk about.

That's why I like them because they're oddities of the rail network. What I'm going to do today is talk to some other people and our first guest is Lyndsey Melbourne. She's the Head of Information and Analysis at the Office of Rail and Road. Lyndsey hi, can you tell the listeners and me why the ORR reports on and makes this public railway industry data?

Lyndsey: Hi Geoff. As you mentioned in your introduction, we are the main producer of official statistics for the rail industry. Official statistics produced by us or other government departments on other topics are produced for the benefit of society as a whole, in essence they're for the public good.

For example, we publish quarterly statistics on rail performance so the punctuality and reliability of trains, stats on usage, so whether that be passenger journeys made or freight trains using their network and also a range of stats on things to do with passenger experience like complaints made, delay compensation claims, passenger assistance bookings. Some of our annual stats, publications cover themes, such as rail finance, health and safety, rail emissions, and much more. 

Just going back to official statistics. They support transparency, they enable people, organisations to make decisions and to develop insights based on high quality data. Public trust in official statistics is vital and ORR's independence helps to engender this I think. All official stats produced are subject to regulation by the Office for Statistics Regulation, so we'll have more on that later from Louisa.

Lastly, it's just important to note that ORR keeps production of official statistics very distinct from its judgements as a regulator. One of the objectives of official stats is impartiality. Therefore, our statistical releases don't include our view as a regulator, so we don't compare results against targets or give judgment on how rail entities are performing.

Geoff: Does that mean that you do talk to some of the train operating companies and you compare stats and figures. Do you ever have any disagreements with them?

Lyndsey: Yes, so we do collect data from train operators. Just here, for example, one of the sets of statistics I mentioned earlier around complaints, we collect complaint volumes and reasons for complaints from all train operators, so we use that data for our regulatory role, because train operators have complaints handling licenses that we monitor. But then we produce statistics every quarter on those complaints data and we do present that for every train operator. We present charts showing that data, so in effect there are rankings there and lead title, but we know every train operator operates in a different environment, have different numbers of passengers. So historically, we've always normalised that data. So we do it complaints per 100,000 journeys because if you're running more trains and have more passengers, it's inevitable you will get more complaints in our statistics. 

Geoff: There's a heck of a lot of data that's out there and I'm assuming you might have more that you don't even put on your website. If you just go through what is publicly available on the website, I'm assuming you might give more to train operators, but it must take a lot of time to compile. I know you do it like you're reporting year is like the financial year so April through March. Is there a reason for that? And how long does it take to compile all that data on an annual basis?

Lyndsey: A lot of the data that we are collecting is used for both the purposes of ORR. So we use it to fulfill our economic and safety regulation functions. But a significant amount of that data we collect for regulatory purposes is also then needed for publishing these official statistics. So all of that data we're collecting, we're collecting it on every railway period, so that's four weeks or every quarter, or sometimes annually.

It's subject to extensive quality assurance processes to ensure it's fit for purpose, and high quality to be used for both regulatory and statistical purposes. This step does take quite a lot of time but does depend on the size and complexity of the data set.

In terms of producing a report, the next step after that quality assurance of that data and processing of that data is to produce data tables, and then analysis of the data by the lead statistician, so that they can write the commentary in the report and produce charts showing the key trends. One report, whether that be a quarterly one or an annual one involves quite a few people in the team and say, probably takes around a week once the data is then available to them to do.

Geoff: Okay. There's a lot of different types of outputs on there. For each of the stats, there's reports and there's tables and there's dashboards. There's a whole mix. Why is that?

Lyndsey: Our data portal was relaunched a couple of years ago and the aim of that was to be a user-friendly, one-stop-shop for all rail statistics. The different outputs reflect different user needs really. We've got a wide range of users. The data tables, for example, give users who just want that raw data to reuse or interrogate. While the reports provide factual commentary and interpretation of trends. For more technical users who want to delve into the detail, we have a quality and methodology report that accompanies every release as well.

An interesting finding, actually, from our Google Analytics showed that users from 142 different countries across the world accessed our data portal over the last year. So yes, lots of users.

Geoff: Not just people in Britain. I like to think that my wider YouTube audience I've made them aware of your website and I've directed them towards you. Really, do you get people in Andorra or Argentina?

Lyndsey: Argentina and Brazil were definitely on the list of 142 countries. 

Geoff: I love it. Okay, Lyndsey, thank you. Now we're going to go into some of the key rail statistics for the past year in a minute. Before we do that, earlier this week, the Rail and Road caught up with some of the others who work on the rail stats in the ORR to find out what their top stats from the railway were from the past year.

[music]

Speaker 1: I think my favourite stat of the last year would be freight train kilometres. It was roughly a 10% drop on the previous year. Whilst that doesn't sound particularly great, when you compare it with, say, passenger operators who saw a 25% drop, I think it makes you appreciate how important the role of that freight played in the company's response to the pandemic.

Speaker 2: My favourite statistic from the past year is that 38% of Britain's rail network is electrified. This is around 6,000 kilometres out of a total of 16,000 kilometres. This proportion has been largely unchanged in recent years and this figure is often used when thinking about decarbonisation and sustainable rail travel for the future.

Speaker 3: My favourite statistic for the past year is that the ticketing and refunds policy was the most common source of rail passenger complaints, accounting for 17% of all complaints. This gives us important insights into how passengers' experience of train travel has been affected during the pandemic. As historically, the most common category of complaints were about the punctuality and reliability of services.

[music]

Geoff: Fascinating stuff. Okay, before we turn our attention back to the ORR and some of the stats it's produced this past year I wanted to bring in Louisa McCutchen from the Office for Statistics Regulation and they regulate not just the railway statistics that the ORR produces, but also other areas. Louisa, can you tell us a bit about the OSR, what you do and what they do?

Louisa: Yes, at the Office for Statistics Regulation, our vision is simple. We believe that statistics should serve the public good. This means they should be freely available to all, and that they should help people to answer the questions that are most important to them. As statistics regulators, it's our role to support everyone to have confidence in statistics.

We do this by helping statistics producers like those at ORR to improve their outputs, where we particularly focus on ensuring that they're trustworthy, they're of high quality, and that they meet the needs of a whole range of users. We also receive complaints from the public about the use and misuse of statistics. When we receive these complaints, we investigate and where necessary we will intervene in some cases, write public letters about our findings.

Geoff: Now, hang on. You guys, you're the OSR, not to be confused with other acronym the ORR. Are you like sworn enemies, or do you team up and work together nicely? [laughs]

Louisa: We work together really well, but the acronyms do get a bit confusing sometimes.

Geoff: I'm glad you said that. How do you guys work together? What do you do together?

Louisa: We work together in a variety of different ways. Back in 2020, we assessed the estimates of station usage statistics against our code of practice for statistics. We spoke to lots of different users, I think, including yourself, and tried to work out how they could be improved.

More recently, we've been working with ORR to identify how statistics about the accessibility of the rail network can be enhanced. For example, whether we can find out more about who is using concessionary rail cards and whether it's possible to produce comparable and good quality statistics about the station infrastructure that supports people with disabilities to access the rail network. From time to time, we also give advice to the team about more general statistics issues.

Geoff: Now, I hate to mention the dreaded C-word, COVID, but we have been in a pandemic for the past goodness knows how many months now and there's a website that pops up that I still check most days, the coronavirus data portal. That didn't exist two years ago. I think that's highlighted that public trust in official statistics is vital. So Louisa, why are independent stats so important?

Louisa: So statistics influence choices made by so many people. They influence how people vote and where they live and right now, for many people, they are impacting the day-to-day decisions we're making about how much to socialise and whether to travel based on, as you say, the COVID-19 rates statistics.

In the rail industry, statistics support decisions around service planning and investment, and for transport users, they can influence decisions about how to make a journey, for example, influencing whether you believe you're getting good value for money or how confident you are that your journey will be pleasant, or that it will run on time.

To be able to confidently make these decisions, people need to be able to trust that statistics are developed by expert statisticians and data analysts without political or industry interference. From working with ORR, we are confident that their statistics are produced by expert teams, separate from their role as a regulator, and with Lyndsey, the head of profession for statistics, making the final decision on what is published and when. All of these things mean that the public can trust the independence of ORR statistics to make the decisions that they want to make.

Geoff: Well, I do. I trust them. I trust them implicitly. I trust them so much I quote them verbatim on video as a historical record to be seen forever. Louisa, that's great. Thank you, very insightful. Next up though, we want to bring in Jay Symonds. Jay, are you there?

Jay: I am, hi Geoff.

Geoff: I recently had the pleasure of catching up with Jay outside Stratford station just a couple of weeks ago, which weirdly because of the shift in passenger usage, Stratford Station has become London's most used station, beating Charing Cross and Victoria and Waterloo.

That was following the most recent publication of the ORR station usage stats, which is as good a place to start than any of these stats. They've become a thing. Haven't they Jay? They've produced some great data this year more than ever, probably.

Jay: Yes, Geoff. Just to give you a few highlights. You started touching on them already. Stratford London, most used station in London in April '20 to March '21 but also the most used station in Great Britain, that was Stratford London as well.

Geoff: It wasn't just London, was it? It was the most used in the country.

Jay: Right.

Geoff: Sorry. Of course, yes.

Jay: That's it. These are statistics for Great Britain, that we publish, and that Stratford London was a bit of a surprise to many of us, that that was the most used station. It was eighth last year, and this year it has decreased a lot in passenger usage down to 14 million entries and exits during the year but up to number one.

There was some big changes in the top 10 most used stations in Great Britain. We had stations like Barking, Clapham Junction, East Croydon, Highbury and Islington, entering the top 10 at the expense of some of the bigger stations like Euston, King's Cross, Paddington, and St Pancras.

Geoff: Because everybody's stopped, don't travel commuting into Zone 1, and instead, I would call them hub stations-- I like that word, around of the Zones 2, Zone 3. Like your Highbury and Islington and your Claphams, they became the key stations. Now, you said that I was surprised, but I was chatting with my friend and my friend and I, about a week before you came out with your stats, one of us, I can't remember who it was, I can't take credit, one of us actually said, "Maybe Stratford would do really well." We thought it might do really well.

Now, it's very obvious, isn't it? If no one's going into Zone 1, but people are still traveling, then the key hub stations around London suddenly become some of the busiest stations. So my question is, Jay, is will that pattern hold for next year, or will Waterloo ever reclaim its crown?

Jay: It's a good question. I can't predict and say for certain obviously if that's going to happen. I think there has been a shift in just how passengers are using the network. That is going to change. I think it will revert back to some extent, but I think there is a longer-term shift there. I think in potential for making those long journeys into work that people previously made, long commutes into Central London terminal stations, how much they're going to come back, in the short to medium term I don't know. 

And that does appear to have had a big impact on what the most used stations are in London and GB as a whole.

Geoff: Sure. Thank you. My next question pertains to the pandemic, which obviously had a massive impact on passenger numbers in the last year, Jay. Now, your rail usage stats show the lowest numbers since the mid-19th century. Crazy. Can you just touch on these stats and how you align them with others such as rail performance?

Jay: I can. We publish quarterly passenger rail usage statistics. Again, for the year April 2020 to March 2021, there was actually a 78% drop in passengers, so a huge, unprecedented drop there in that year. We also publish quarterly stats on passenger rail performance. That's things I think we mentioned earlier, things like how many trains are on time, how many trains are cancelled.

What we like to do across all our stats, but in these two sets in particular is to link the changes in rail usage with performance. That's because we know that changes in the number of trains and passengers has an impact on how the rail network performs. For example, how many trains are on time, that is impacted by how busy the network is, how many trains there are, how many passengers are alighting and boarding trains.

Geoff: Now, I've got to ask about how you actually collect the data. When we made a video last week, you mentioned the LENNON Database, for example. I'm not sure everybody in my video knew what that was, so from how many place, how many different organisations do you collect data to be able to produce your range of stats?

Jay: The main source for the estimates for station usage is ticketing data.

Geoff: Okay, were you going to say LENNON?

Jay: Do you want me to say what LENNON stands for? Someone might have to step in and correct me, but I think it's Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Overnight.

Geoff: I'm so glad we clarified that. Oh, we're getting a thumbs up from Lyndsey. That's good. Really, right.

Jay: Yes, so that's what LENNON stands for. I'm not sure that means much to people. It's essentially the national ticketing and revenue database or system and this records the vast majority of rail tickets that are bought for the network in Great Britain. We get access to that data, it's an industry database and we get access to that data, which basically shows us all the journeys, the tickets that are in that system that are made during the year, but it doesn't include every single journey made on the rail network.

Geoff: Well, I was going to say. What about if someone's got like a Rover ticket, a Ranger of ticket? How is that included?

Jay: I'm not an expert on Rover tickets. I believe at least some Rover tickets and you'll have to correct me Geoff are in LENNON, but they will just be recorded as a ticket, obviously a multi-use ticket and off the back of that, we will make assumptions, estimates about how many times that ticket was used and I think there may well be some standard sort of numbers around that and more importantly, I guess, where that ticket was used between which stations and how many times.

If those tickets aren't in LENNON, which they may not be in every case, so other sources of data ticketing information we get from metropolitan areas, so where they have separate ticketing systems and databases, we do get data from those areas and they may include some Rover tickets. It is possible that we don't capture-- I mean, I think we won't capture every single ticket for every single journey and so it is possible that we don't capture some of those tickets, but my understanding was that a lot of them were included in the LENNON database and so we will be capturing them.

Geoff: Okay. Now I'm a big fan of the least used station so I'm always keeping an eye out for the ones with very low or in this year's case, six stations with zero passengers but that's what I like. Is there a set of stats that you look forward to producing the most, Jay?

Jay: The only statistics I produce are these estimates for station usage statistics, and we produce them sort of during most of the year sort of in preparation and working with our transport contractor who helps with those estimates. They're the ones that I look forward to the most as well. They're the most interesting set of stats, generate a lot of interest, opportunities to produce a range of infographics, videos, get involved in media activities, including radio interviews and YouTube interviews with Geoff Marshall.

Most of our stats and stats what I've worked on in other departments in the past we don't get into those sorts of opportunities so yes, definitely something to look forward to each year.

Geoff: Lyndsey or Louisa, do you have your own favourite stats that you like looking forward to at this time of year?

Lyndsey: This is actually a really difficult question for me to answer as I know, all our stats are relevant and useful and lots of time and effort goes into producing them by the team, so estimates of station usage, as you know, gets the most coverage and data portal downloads but I think I'm actually going to sit on the fence a bit it here and say, my favourite stats is actually annual compendium as that has a one-page summary for each of our stats themes so my answer is therefore all of them.

Geoff: That's like being a parent with, even though-- if you have three children and you ask the parent what's their favourite child and they just go, "All of them."

Lyndsey: Exactly.

Geoff: Equal love, actually that's quite interesting. You said about the number of downloads. Do you know how many people actually download the main spreadsheet from your site? How many hits?

Lyndsey: The Google Analytics are really useful so we've got the information about how many countries people access the portal from, we do have views on the webpages, downloads and yes, as we said, the download of the station usage dataset is the most popular, but our freight statistics or passenger usage statistics - all downloaded very heavily as well. We do monitor that to check that they are being used and we're putting the resources in the right place for these statistics so yes, really interesting stats from the analytics too, that we have.

Geoff: Fair enough, I do feel partly responsible. I think it was in last year's spreadsheet there was a note in the column that went, media exposure increased the number of passengers to this station because I think everybody went to, it was either Shippea Hill or Berney Arms. It was one of the years we went there and everybody went, oh, let's all go there. It went up by 600% and we were like, yes, that's our fault, that's all on us. Louisa, you must have a favourite stat, go on, give us something else other than the least used.

Louisa: I've been working recently on statistics about the accessibility of transport so I've just really enjoyed learning about what's been collected in ORR, but also across the UK about who's using the stations, how accessible they are, but also thinking about where there are gaps and where there can be improvements to these statistics.

Geoff: Do you know off the top of your head out of the two and a half thousand, how many stations are completely step-free, accessible?

Louisa: I do know off the top of my head that there isn't a clear answer there. Depends how you define step-free access and it's something that actually Lyndsey and I have been talking about recently and talking about whether it's a publication that perhaps in the future ORR could develop.

Geoff: A new thing that you're going to produce?

Louisa: Yes. We're working on a report in OSR about the accessibility of transport, hoping to publish relatively early in the new year, and we'll make some recommendations, including around improving the statistics around step-free access and the other accessibility elements of the train stations.

Geoff: Moving on, we'll get Lyndsey back in as well for this one, so we're not just picking on you, Jay.

Something that always happens is that there's a little bit of a discourse, discussion between myself and yourself in like the couple of weeks to month leading up but I'm always hounding you for like, hints in advance, what the new least used station might be and you never tell me until everybody knows at 9:30 in the morning. Lyndsey, Jay, why do you keep your stats so top secret until that morning of release, why can't you have a press embargo for selected people?

Lyndsey: Well, the simple answer is that we must comply with the code of practice for statistics and this includes rules and principles around the release of statistics. The restrictions on access before publication helps to engender this trust that we've been talking about in the statistics, so all users see them at exactly the same time.

It's worth noting that as you say, all our statistics are published at 9:30 AM, usually on a Thursday, all our official statistics we do preannounce the date of when they're going to be published, we have a publication calendar on our data portal, so everyone can see 12 months ahead what's coming out when.

Like Louisa said earlier, it's all around showing that everyone gets these statistics all at the same time. There's no opportunity there for any kind of interference with those. We are producing them independently, purely factual, high quality statistics. I know you would love to get some hints beforehand but we have to comply with the code practice for statistics, or I will get into trouble with the regulator.

Geoff: Louisa, can I wear you down or are you going to hold the party line as well? There's no way that I can get a sneak preview on those stats for next year?

Louisa: No, you can't. Whereas transparency of statistics is really important that everyone gets to see them at the same time, whilst what you are doing with them might be quite innocent, sounds quite fun, for others it's really important that they see statistics at the same time as others who are making decisions based on them that we can be confident that there isn't political interference in the messaging that comes out around them.

Geoff: Which then builds trust and then makes people respect them more year on year. No, I understand really. I just wanted to like tease you a little bit just to try and get in there. Talking of which now, I was doing my revision last night before we recorded this podcast, I was watching back some of my older videos and I was looking up Angel Road, which used to be a terrible station in North London about four, five years ago I was there.

It's since been replaced with a new station, Meridian Water but about 2016/17 it used to have like 80,000 passengers a year and then there's a quote from me in the video. That must have been the year that you revised how you did your estimates and it dropped from like 80,000 to a much more accurate like 27/28,000. Something obviously changed that year. I'm going to pick on Jay here, I think. Do you make improvements every year, all the time to improve your stats? Are they going to be refined more for next year, for 2022?

Jay: Yes, we do make improvements and particularly with these statistics, these estimates of station usage, the feedback we've had is that users prefer the best estimate that we can provide, even if that means it's on a slightly different basis to, say, the year before.

But importantly, they do want us to add a note alongside those estimates to say, we've changed the way we're doing this, or we've improved the way we're making these estimates. And a common example of that is that we found more data from these metropolitan areas or potentially other sources-- and I think Heathrow Express was a recent one that I talked to you about previously, that we managed to get some data from Heathrow Express to provide estimates for those stations. Clearly that’s hopefully a good thing and so there are inconsistencies from year to year.

We do clearly note these inconsistencies and usually say they're positive things. They're improvements to the estimates that we're either finding other ticketing information or better ticketing information to improve these estimates or we're making adjustments based on other information that we've received again, to make them the best estimates that they can possibly be.

Geoff: Okay. I'm going to follow up these official questions with a Geoff Marshall bonus round, just to put fear into you all, What the listeners can't see at home is that I'm looking like a Zoom screen of like six people and it's almost like a quiz show. I can point and pick on someone, so any anyone can step in and answer this question.

It's one I asked Jay last week in the video, which you may not have seen is that I am always fascinated by, do you still count statistics for closed stations? But then that gets into the world of what defines a station as being closed and is a station still open, but just not served? I think places like Wedgewood and Barweston then Corfe Castle, which is a heritage line that had a summer service but now hasn't from COVID, it might not come back again.

Bishops Lydeard. GWR again ran a summer service and then you got IBM Man United what's the third one? Oh, British -- Redcar, British Steel, which as far as I'm aware, isn't closed, but Northern just aren't stopping trains there. If you're not stopping trains there, it's obviously got no passengers. 

So how do you deal with stations that have no passengers? Are they closed or are they just open with no passengers? Anyone step in and answer this question.

Jay: I suspect it's me answering this one, Geoff again.

Geoff: I think so, sorry.

Jay: That's all right. I'm trying to remember what I said to you last time so it's not too different.

Geoff: Just repeat what you said last week.

Jay: Just a slightly different angle on it is that these stations that are not running any services, there aren't any passengers. There aren't going to be many interesting stats on those stations because nothing's happening. There is a question, it's a fair question about how we define whether a station exists or is open and the definition we use for the estimates of station usage is that there are services running to and from that station or there are services planned to be running to or from that station.

If services are suspended indefinitely, which I think for some of those stations you mentioned, they have been, then we don't include them on our list of stations. But again as I said previously to you, I could understand why some people would want those stations on the list because potentially at a later date, I guess in some cases, those services someone may take a decision to reinstate those services again and they'll start again. Then we would include them in our statistics again, but it's a decision that we wanted to define how many stations there are in Great Britain at the end of each financial year and we've based it on this whether trains, services are running or planned to be running from each of those stations.

Geoff: Yes you talk about number of stations, Just this week we went up from 2569 to 2570. So Soham, the town in Cambridgeshire, got its station back. What that will be included is-- what are we in now? December 2021 now, so that will fall into the accounting period of April '21 through March '22. That will get just four months' worth of passenger numbers, so that will be out at the end of 2022. Is that correct?

Jay: Yes. No. That's right. Yes they should be at our next set of stats, our next and we should have estimates for that station. I don't know how many services are running to and from that station, but however many there are, hopefully we'll be picking up the tickets.

Geoff: It occurred to me the other day. You do strictly run like a financial year. You run from April the 1st through to March the 31st. Is that correct?

Jay: Yes most of our statistics are on that basis or quarterly statistics on a financial year basis. Yes that's right.

Geoff: Lyndsey, Jay, Louisa thank you. A fascinating insight into a lot of ORR stats. That is all we have time for today. Thank you for listening to the Rail and Road Pod. I've been Geoff Marshall. Kenny Walker, your regular host will be back for the next instalment of the pod. Until then, thank you and goodbye.