Booked, and booked to run if required
A freight path in the timetable is not a promise. Most carry a flag saying the working runs as required: the path is held every day and used on the days there is traffic for it. Only about one booked path in five is unconditional, which is the single biggest reason a count of the timetable and a count of trains on the railway are so far apart.
It varies by what is in the wagons. Container trains from the ports and the biomass circuit run to a fixed pattern; general merchandise, metals and the engineering fleet are mostly held on call.
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.
Time built in
A freight path is timed with slack written into it, point by point. A pathing allowance is time added so the working does not conflict with faster trains at a junction or on a shared stretch; an engineering allowance covers a speed restriction on the line. Both are on the schedule, and between them they are on almost every freight working of the day.
The lines freight is booked over
Where a stretch of railway has more than one pair of tracks, the schedule says which line the working takes. Freight lives on the slow, relief and goods lines wherever they exist, and takes the fast line only where there is nothing else.
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 the timetable cannot say, and what the regulator can
Three things are missing from the counts above on purpose, because the honest version of each is not the figure people expect. The Office of Rail and Road publishes all three, so they follow below, counted a different way and labelled as such.
The timetable names no operator. The obvious chart would be DB Cargo against GB Railfreight against Freightliner. It cannot be built from the schedule feed: the operator field is left as a placeholder on about 91% of freight schedules. The regulator counts train kilometres by operator instead, which is a different measure of the same railway.
The timetable has no 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 is actually lifted, so it is shown per-train and never totalled. The regulator publishes what was moved and what was lifted.
The timetable has no past. The counts above start from the day the page was built and the archive behind the live map keeps passenger running only. The regulator's series run back to 1982.
Forty years of rail freight, from the regulator
Everything in this section is the Office of Rail and Road's own published figure, compiled from Network Rail's records. It is what the industry itself counts, rather than what the timetable books, and the two should be read side by side rather than against each other.
How much is moved, since 1982
Freight moved is tonnes multiplied by distance. The long slide is coal: 5.9 billion net tonne kilometres of it in 1982-83 and next to none now, with the last coal-fired power station gone in 2024. Containers from the deep-sea ports and construction stone have taken its place, which is why the total has held up better than the coal story alone would suggest.
What was moved, by commodity
Trains run, since 2003
Fewer trains, each heavier and longer. The number of freight trains run has more than halved in twenty years while the tonnage moved has fallen far less.
Who runs them
Train kilometres by operator. GB Railfreight has overtaken DB Cargo as the biggest by distance run, with Freightliner close behind DB. The regulator also splits this by traction: electric haulage was about 8% of freight train kilometres in the year to March 2026, against the 3% of workings booked for electric traction above. The two are different measures, and the electric ones tend to be the long-distance container trains.
How reliably it runs
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.
Do all the booked freight trains actually run?
No. Only about one booked path in five is unconditional; most are held in the timetable "as required" and used on the days there is traffic. Network Rail counted 186,131 freight trains run in the year to March 2026, roughly one for every five paths booked.
How much freight does Britain move by rail?
About 16 billion net tonne kilometres a year and around 70 million tonnes lifted, on the regulator's figures. Containers and construction materials are the two biggest flows; coal has all but gone.
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. The historical series, the commodity and operator splits and the reliability figures are the Office of Rail and Road's freight statistics (tables 1310, 1315, 1330, 1333, 1355 and 1365), refreshed here within a week of each quarterly release. Full sources and licences are on the data and credits page.