Greater Anglia has won three national awards for train performance for the second year in a row.

At the Golden Whistles Awards 2024 – an annual event organised by Modern Railways magazine and the Chartered Institution of Rail Operators to celebrate excellence in UK railway operations – the train operator again won the award for Best London and South East operator (for its commuter and regional services), Best Long Distance operator (for its Norwich – Ipswich – Colchester – London intercity services) and Best Operational Performance (for minimising delays).

It is the first time that an operator has achieved such success at the awards two years running.

The awards are solely based on actual operational results and statistics, rather than any wider factors, and reflect Greater Anglia’s sustained high levels of train performance over the last year.

The Greater Anglia moving annual average PPM figure is now at 94.6%, using the long-standing public performance measure (PPM) which records train arrivals at destination within 5 minutes of schedule time (or 10 minutes for intercity services) - continuing the historically high results being delivered by the train operator for the last four years.

The impressive results are also evident using the more challenging “Time to 3” performance measure – which measures the arrival within 3 minutes of every single train at every single station it serves. On this measure GA’s annual performance is 94.3%.

These consistently good results, and associated recognition at the awards event, are testament to a number of factors, including the positive impact of the new trains now in place across the entire Greater Anglia network (which accelerate quicker, brake quicker, are more reliable and enable better recovery from delays than the trains they replaced); a real focus from teams across Greater Anglia on improving performance, and joint work between Greater Anglia and Network Rail to raise punctuality and reliability standards (including better infrastructure performance delivered by Network Rail).

It means that GA is consistently the best-performing operator in the UK, despite operating over one of the more complex and congested networks.

Jamie Burles, Managing Director, Greater Anglia said: “We’re really proud to have received these three major awards for the second year in a row. It’s deserved recognition for our teams and the excellent performance being delivered across Greater Anglia over the past 12 months.

“Customers consistently rate a punctual and reliable service as their key priority for rail travel, so we have been focusing relentlessly on meeting those expectations and, with the help of our new trains and targeted work by colleagues across our company, day in, day out, we have been delivering performance at the highest standards ever seen in our region, on an ongoing basis, for four years now.

“We pledged that with the help of our new trains we would transform the rail travel experience in East Anglia, both in terms of the on-train environment and performance standards. We’re achieving that aim and we are fully focused on maintaining and further improving service standards in the years ahead to deliver an even better, more consistent service.”