How are disruption statistics calculated?

Rijden de Treinen automatically calculates statistics about train disruptions, based on the disruptions archive containing years of service disruptions on the Dutch railway network. Statistics are calculated for a number of time periods and for each individual railway line. This allows you to see for example which line is the most affected by service disruptions in any given time period, or what is the most occurring cause for a disruption.

Each disruption is linked to one or more railway lines. This link is made automatically and is based on the affected stations as mentioned in the disruption message. For example, when NS notifies passengers that there is a train disruption between Amsterdam Central and Amsterdam Amstel, the railway line Amsterdam-Utrecht is automatically linked to this disruption.

The railway lines used by Rijden de Treinen is a standardized set of railway lines, based on logical routes through the railway network. Because the list of railway lines hasn’t changed since Rijden de Treinen tracks statistics about railway disruptions, it’s possible to see trends for individual lines, or to compare them with each other.

Railway lines are always linked to the last disruption message of each disruption. For instance, when a disruption message mentioned multiple affected lines, and a later message mentions only a single line, only that single line is used for the statistics.

Duration of a disruption

For each disruption, you can see how long it took before the disruption was resolved. The duration is calculated for the time that the disruption message by NS was active. Often, the disruption started some time before there is a disruption message.

What is actually considered a service disruption?

For Rijden de Treinen, each disruption message which is published on the NS website is considered as a service disruption. A disruption message is usually placed when there are no or less trains running on a railway line, or when trains are running with a considerable delay. No disruption message is published when there are only a few trains delayed.

All disruption messages are automatically processed, without manual intervention or delay. This means that the data (and the accuracy of the data) depends on the information as published by NS.

Disruption causes

A cause is noted for each train disruption. The cause is published by NS. Sometimes, a disruption cause changes over time. In these cases, the last cause is taken as the cause for the statistics. When the cause changes to the cause ‘due to an earlier disruption’, the earlier cause is used for the statistics.