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Waterloo continues to top list of Britain’s busiest rail stations

More passengers passed through London Waterloo than any other station last year, the latest figures from the ORR show.

In 2015-16, an estimated 99 million people entered and exited the station, a similar figure to the previous year. Overall, nine of Britain’s 10 busiest rail stations were in London, in a sign of the amount of pressure on the capital’s rail services.

The only exception was Birmingham New Street, which was at number seven with 39 million passengers, up from number eight the previous year.

There was one ‘new entry’ on the list this year, with Clapham Junction, where 32 million people passed through, replacing Charing Cross at number 10.

In Scotland, Glasgow Central, the busiest station, was used by 30 million people. This was followed by Edinburgh (22 million) and Glasgow Queen Street, which had 16 million passengers despite being closed for 20 weeks for a tunnel refurbishment. Cardiff Central, the busiest station in Wales, had nearly 13 million customers.

Overall, there were over 2.9 billion entries and exits at Britain’s rail stations, a 5% increase from the previous year. There were also 222 million connections made. The figures reflect the unprecedented level of demand on Britain’s rail network, which had the highest number of passenger journeys ever in 2015-16, and add pressure to the demands for infrastructure improvements to cope with the demand and reverse a trend of increasing performance problems.

Waterloo will be one of the first stations to be upgraded, with platforms 1-9 due to be closed throughout August next year to allow for platform extensions to accommodate 10-carriage trains.

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