Guides and notes
How to read a timetable, what the delay figures on this site mean, and how they are measured. Written from the archive, and short on anything we cannot show you.
Why a train can be late at one station and on time at the next
Delay is not a single property of a train. It is a measurement taken at a place, and it changes along the route. Understanding that is the difference between reading a punctuality figure correctly and being misled by one.
Why we publish a median delay, not an average
An average delay is dragged upward by a handful of very bad days, so it describes a journey most passengers never take. The median describes the ordinary one. Here is the difference, and why it matters when you are deciding what time to leave for the station.
Reading a Pakistan Railways timetable: a plain guide
What the arrival and departure columns actually mean, why a train carries UP or DN after its number, how an overnight service crosses midnight on paper, and how to tell a scheduled time from a recorded one.
Up and down: how Pakistan Railways numbers its trains
Every Pakistani train carries a number and a direction, and the two are not independent. Across the 105 passenger services we track, the pattern holds without a single exception in one direction and with exactly one in the other. Here is the rule, the evidence, and the one train that breaks it.
What we mean when we say a train was on time
Every punctuality figure hides a set of choices: how late counts as late, how many runs are enough to publish, which arrival the number describes, and what gets thrown away. Here are ours, in full, so you can judge our numbers rather than trust them.
Where our train delay data comes from
Every figure on this site traces back to something we recorded at the time. This explains what we collect, how an arrival becomes a recorded arrival, what we do when we cannot tell, and why some pages show nothing at all.