What Britain's freight trains are carrying
Every freight schedule carries a category code: the old British Rail sector code, which names the commodity outright. Aggregates dominate (stone from the Mendip and Peak District quarries, feeding construction across the south east), followed by general merchandise, metals and containers from the deep-sea ports.
The rest of the freight timetable is not carrying anything. Light locomotives moving between depots, engineering and departmental trains, and test runs are all booked as freight and all run on the same paths, but nothing is in the wagons, often because there are no wagons.
The busiest freight locations
Not stations: quarries, docks, yards and terminals. Each is counted once for every working that starts there and once for every working that ends there, so a yard that both sends and receives ranks high on the combined figure.
Freight is a night railway
Passenger services collapse to almost nothing after midnight and peak sharply twice a day. Freight does neither. Its quietest hour still runs about half the workings of its busiest, and close to a third of the day's freight sets off between 10pm and 6am. The paths it wants are the ones passenger trains are not using, and a quarry or a port works to its own timetable rather than the commuter peak.
How heavy, and how fast
Freight paths are timed for a trailing load and a maximum speed, and both are on the schedule. A typical working is timed for well over a thousand tonnes behind the locomotive, and for 60mph. That is a third of the speed of the expresses it shares the line with, and the single biggest reason freight is so hard to path.
Saturday and Sunday are different railways
Freight thins out far more sharply at the weekend than passenger services do, and Sunday is quieter again, partly because Sunday is when much of the network is handed over to engineering work.
What these numbers do not say
Three things are missing on purpose, because the honest version of each is not the figure people expect.
There is no operator breakdown. The obvious chart here would be DB Cargo against GB Railfreight against Freightliner. It cannot be built from this data: the operator field is left as a placeholder on about 91% of freight schedules, so any split would be a chart of the small minority that happen to fill it in, presented as if it were the industry.
There is no total tonnage. The trailing load on a schedule is the weight a path is timed for, not a measured payload, and the empty return leg carries one too. Added up across a day it comes to millions of tonnes, an order of magnitude more than Britain's railways actually lift, so it is shown per-train and never totalled.
There is no history. These counts start from the day the page was built. The archive behind the live map keeps passenger running data only, so there is no past freight to reconstruct, and a trend line would have to be invented.
Frequently asked questions
How many freight trains run in the UK each day?
Around 3,400 freight and trip workings are booked on a typical weekday, about 1,500 on a Saturday and 700 on a Sunday. That is scheduled workings, including light locomotives and engineering trains as well as loaded freight.
What do UK freight trains carry?
Aggregates first, by a wide margin, then general merchandise, metals, building materials and containers. Around a third of the freight timetable is not carrying anything at all.
Is UK rail freight electric or diesel?
Overwhelmingly diesel: only about 3% of weekday workings are booked for electric traction, even though much of the route mileage they use is wired.
Can I see freight trains on a live map?
Yes, on the live train map, drawn as dark-outlined arrows, with a freight panel listing every working running right now, what it is carrying and its trailing load.
Where the data comes from
The scheduled figures are counted from Network Rail's daily schedule extract, the national timetable in machine-readable form, rebuilt here every night. The live count comes from the same feeds that drive the map: Network Rail's train movement stream for freight, and National Rail's Darwin feed for everything else. Full sources and licences are on the data and credits page.