(21 Aug 2015, 4:07 pm)aureolin wrote Scheduling is within an operators control though. Does anyone have an idea of how much leeway is there for late running planned into your average schedule?

This is a gripe I have with other industries, where they'll schedule a worker for successive 13 hour shifts. Completely inflexible and no leeway to ensure the regs on daily rest between shifts is met.

My experience is based on the route I drive most often.
We have 5 mins at one end and 3 mins at the other. There are a few minutes spare in the overall route end to end, so we can make up for small delays (we have had a lot of temporary lights and roadworks over the last 6 months, at one point we had 6(!) sets on our route!). I left Middlesbrough 8 late yesterday because of operational difficulties should we say. It took me til Loftus to get those 8 mins back, and that was on a quiet morning outbound run.
At peak times we get more layover at both ends to ensure reliability is kept up for our regular commuters, sometimes upto 20 minutes which gives us a quick break from the driving which always helps too. It also means that if huge delays do happen (which they do from time to time) these longer layovers give us a chance of getting the service back on track.
We recently changed the timetable including swapping routes at the downroute end so that we serve Skinningrove one way and Liverton on the other which overall saves 2-3 mins on a round trip. This was put back into the timetable on the run into Middlesbrough to give us a more robust schedule to deal with heavy loadings or indeed remove any late running from higher up the route.
Having said all of this, there are ultimately some duties that do go near to the 5.5 hours driving time, or indeed short breaks (majority of our breaks are ~45 mins) can also play a part in knocking us back.
All of this considered, I think our 95% punctuality figure for the last month (the best Sapphire route in the country!) is thanks to our close knit team who will try their best to keep things running. Lost mileage is very small too, though I don't have a figure.