Improving Performance Insight at Northern

Customer

Northern Trains

Solution

AEGIS – High-resolution railway performance analytics platform

The Challenge

Northern operates one of the UK’s largest regional rail networks, with a complex mix of fleets, operating environments and service patterns.

Like many train operators, Northern relied heavily on traditional performance reporting tools that focus on threshold-based delay reporting. While these tools identify major incidents, they often fail to capture small running time losses and operational variability that accumulate into significant performance impacts.

As a result, Northern faced several key challenges:

• Limited visibility of sub-threshold delay mechanisms
• Difficulty identifying where running time was being lost between timing points
• Reliance on average-based reporting, which masked performance variability
• Manual effort required to compile and analyse operational data

Northern required a more granular and evidence-based understanding of operational performance to support timetable planning, fleet management and performance improvement initiatives.

The Solution

Northern implemented AEGIS, Incremental’s railway performance analytics platform designed to analyse train operations at section and berth level resolution.

AEGIS integrates multiple railway data sources including:

• TRUST movement data
• Train Describer berth data
• Timetable and VSTP schedule data
• Onboard GNSS positional data

This multi-source approach enables the platform to analyse train behaviour in one-second resolution, providing a detailed understanding of running time performance across the network.

The system allows Northern to move beyond threshold-based reporting and gain a granular operational view of where time is being lost during train operations.

Implementation

The deployment of AEGIS at Northern was delivered through a structured implementation programme that included:

• Data onboarding and validation workshops
• Alignment of operational timing sections with Northern’s network
• Iterative system configuration based on operational feedback
• Engagement with Performance, Planning and Driver Management teams

The system reconciles unit and headcode allocations using disruption-aware matching logic, ensuring accurate operational traces during both normal and disrupted running conditions.

This ensured that the analytics outputs reflected real operational behaviour rather than theoretical schedules.

Results

AEGIS delivered significant improvements in Northern’s ability to understand operational performance.

Sub-threshold Delay Visibility

The system enabled investigation of running time loss below TRUST reporting thresholds, helping Northern identify previously hidden sources of delay.

Section-Level Performance Insight

AEGIS provides detailed running time distributions at sectional level, replacing reliance on simple averages and revealing variability that drives unexplained delay.

Fleet and Route Benchmarking

Northern can compare performance across different fleets and routes, helping identify recurring delay patterns and infrastructure constraints.

Operational Adoption

Driver Managers and operational staff use map trace visualisation within AEGIS to validate delay events and operational behaviour directly.

Customer Perspective

“AEGIS has enabled us to move beyond threshold reporting and develop a detailed understanding of where time is actually being lost during train operations.”
Performance Team, Northern Trains

The Impact

AEGIS has provided Northern with a data-driven understanding of operational performance, enabling:

• Evidence-based timetable recast planning
• Identification of recurrent delay mechanisms
• Better separation of dispatch and signalling constraints
• Reduced reliance on manual performance analysis

By combining high-resolution positional data with signalling and operational datasets, AEGIS provides Northern with the insight required to identify, quantify and ultimately eliminate unexplained delay across the network.