Here is all you need to know about the full scale of rail chaos that hit the Fylde coast

A passenger's app shows the scale of chaos afflicting Northern Rail and other operators over the past 12 months

The data comes from Nick Mitchell, a software engineer at data specialist SPINR, who, as a long suffering commuter to Manchester, created the Northern Fail App which tracked the catalogue of cancelled and late trains.

It shows Northern Rail fully cancelled 15,800 trains, and partly cancelled 18,696 more.

This is in addition to an increase in the number of trains running with fewer carriages, with 28,198 trains implementing carriage reductions in the same period.

A list of cancellations at the height of the chaos last year

Northern has hit back at the figures, saying it ran 96 per cent of trains as planned and added that many the problems were outside its control. The period followed the electrification and upgrading work on the tracks which had been delayed.

Mr Mitchell said Northern Fail became a go-to source of information for jilted commuters, with 16,000 app downloads. It uses the latest data integration technology to aggregate, transform and prepare the data.

The data also shows there were 258,266 cancelled stops - number of times a train did not stop at a station as scheduled due to the above full or part service cancellations. It recorded 28,198 reduced carriages - train services running but with reduced capacity

And its said 23 per cent of cancelled services due to a shortage of train drivers.

Nick Mitchellsaid: “It’s troubling to see that there are still monumental issues with Northern Rail’s service, not just with excessively high levels of full and part cancellations but the growing number of carriage reductions that make commuters lives hell.

“HS2 has just been criticized for starting out in the wrong place, by building the new line between Birmingham and London first. This delays the much needed infrastructure investment to improve train services in the North, and our data fully supports this claim.”

Northern Rail operated 866,000 services during the past 12 months.

A spokesman said: “During the past year we operated around 866,000 services, carrying 100 million people on journeys across the North.

“The figures show that more than 96 per cent of our services ran as planned, with 1.8 per cent fully cancelled over the 12 month period.

“Our cancelled and seriously delayed rates are below the national average.

“Many of those cancellations were as a result of the introduction of the new timetable in May last year and, together with colleagues across the industry, we have worked hard to improve performance through the rest of 2018 and into 2019.

“Running trains is complex and many factors outside our control, such as mechanical issues, track/signal failings, weather conditions and emergency services incidents, can result in cancellations.

“We strive to keep the impact of such issues to a minimum and our focus is always on delivering the best possible service for our customers.”