Britain's busiest and quietest railway stations (2015-2016)

[jamesontheroad]

The British Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has published passenger usage statistics for the reporting period 2015-2016.

London Waterloo remains England and Britain's busiest railway station, with 99,148,388 entrances and exits. Glasgow Central and Cardiff Central are the busiest in Scotland and Wales respectively.

Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire, a small halt on the (Cambridge / Peterborough) Ely - Norwich Breckland Line has fallen to just 12 ticketed users in the whole year.

Despite twice hourly service on the line in each direction (hourly Norwich - Cambridge and hourly Norwich - Nottingham - Liverpool) it has just one westbound service per day, and only one weekly eastbound service on a Saturday.

The Guardian has a report here, and the raw data is available from the ORR here.

 

[caravanman]

Even our least used station has more train service in one direction, than Amtrak's Sunset limited timetable

Ed.

 

[jis]

That is what I like about British rail service. Barring a few exceptions there is enough service in place at any given point that you almost don't really need to plan too much. You can just show up and more likely than not there will be a train passing through within an hour or two if not sooner.

 

[Anderson]

Yes...IIRC the main exceptions are "ghost stations"/"ghost trains" (mostly run or served in a clunky way for legal reasons) and a few odd-and-end rural lines.

 

[ScouseAndy]

Reddish Station (the 2nd quietest station) used to be my local station at one point, it has 1 service a week on a Friday morning towards Stalybridge from Stockport with no return journey, other than those who are Parliamentary railway enthusiasts who go around collecting ghost trains and stations I have no idea who would ever want to use the train. These Parliamentary trains only run because its cheaper to keep them open then go through the hassle of closing the trains (the Stockport to Stalybridge service costs £96.00 a week to run compared to the thousands it would cost to go through public consultations and public enquiries required to close the station down.