VIA Rail

[plam]

I just checked, and I might not even be exaggerating when I say four out of five. The On-time performance for Train 84 is 58.4% over the last twelve months- but ‘On-time’ for that train is defined as arriving at the final destination “within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time.” If it’s ten minutes early or late, it’s actually on-time, no matter what the passengers might think. And it only achieves that three out of five times. Not so good.

In Switzerland a train is considered late if it arrives 40 seconds or more after the scheduled time. This happens a handful of times out of hundreds of trips.

More than a handful; I have been on a number of late Swiss trains, including one that was 15 minutes late on Friday and one that was 4 minutes late on Sunday. The linked article said 15% of trains were more than 3 minutes late. But it's actually not a disaster for a train to be late, since at worst you wait for the next train an hour later.

VIA Rail is quite aware that its on-time performance is abysmal and getting worse. They claim it is due to not having priority on the lines (and we've seen how CN is a problem). They are hoping to raise money (not from the government) for building their own lines.