Of the many reasons to complain about the railways, being too punctual is not normally one. Yet a rail boss is complaining that his company stands to lose money because too many trains arrive on time.

Keith Heller, the chief executive of EWS, Britain’s biggest rail freight company, said that the Department for Transport’s punctuality target for passenger trains was too ambitious and was delaying his freight trains.

He said that signalmen were keeping slow-moving freight trains waiting for long periods in sidings because they were reluctant to risk even a minute’s delay to a passenger train.

Mr Heller questioned the Government’s target of improving passenger train punctuality to 92.6 per cent by 2014. He said that the present level — 90.5 per cent – was as good as it should get. Going any higher than that would not only affect freight trains but would cost hundreds of millions of pounds in improvements to the network.

Mr Heller asked: “What’s wrong with 90 per cent? There’s a price to going to 91, 92 or 93 per cent. Let’s think about what the trade-offs are in driving to a higher level.

“In any market you are trying to get to a sweet spot. You don’t want to overservice the customer.

“For the sake of efficiency and lower cost, we have to be prepared to take the risk of small delays. People should live with that in return for an affordable network.”

Senior figures at Network Rail agree with Mr Heller but are reluctant to speak publicly because train punctuality is politically very sensitive.

In 2001, the year after the Hatfield crash paralysed the network, a quarter of trains were late. Now fewer than one in ten is late.

Part of the reason for the improvement has been the increase in public subsidy since the Government created Network Rail, from £1.5 billion in 2001 to £5 billion last year.

Unlike Railtrack, Network Rail has had funding to replace rails before they break and add extra tracks at bottlenecks.

Passenger Focus, the rail watchdog, said that Mr Heller was wrong to think that passengers were content with 90 per cent punctuality. Anthony Smith, its chief executive, said: “We totally disagree. Punctuality is still the key factor in keeping passengers happy. If the train arrives late, they are much more likely to notice other problems like poor catering or the state of the toilets.”

Mr Smith said that the Government should be raising its punctuality target, not lowering it.

“Obviously we are not expecting 100 per cent, but our research has found that 19 out of 20 trains on time would be approaching something that is acceptable.”

He said that it was still very rare for individual train companies to have no delays in a single day.

National Express East Coast reported last week that, for the first time since privatisation, all its 136 services on one day had arrived on time.

Passenger Focus is also calling for the official definition of “on time” to be tightened. Presently, a long-distance train is deemed to be on time if it arrives no more than nine minutes and 59 seconds late. A local train is on time if no more than four minutes and 59 seconds late.

Mr Smith said: “Not many people would consider themselves on time if their train arrived nine minutes late, especially as connection times can be as short as five minutes.”

Britain is more honest than many other European countries in reporting train punctuality but is less open than Japan, which counts each second of delay in its official figures. The average train on the Tokaido Shinkansen, between Tokyo and Osaka, was only 30 seconds late last year.

A Network Rail spokesman said that comparisons with foreign railways were invalid because Britain had an intensively used system, with freight and passenger trains sharing the same tracks. “People praise Swiss punctuality, but we run more trains every day in Kent than they do in Switzerland.”

Network Rail is introducing a new target for freight train punctuality in April.

Blowing the whistle

- 91% of trains were on time in the final quarter of 2007-08, the best rate since 1999

- 2000 was the worst year for punctuality since privatisation. In the third quarter, 64 per cent of trains were on time

- 90.6% of trains in London and the South East arrived on time in 2007-08, the highest of any region

- 86.2% of long-distance trains arrived on time, the worst category

Source: Office of the Rail Regulator

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