vallierojas: Train stations in Britain listed and mapped: find out how busy each one is

Friday, May 20, 2011

Train stations in Britain listed and mapped: find out how busy each one is

The most comprehensive dataset about Britain's train stations ever published. Help us make it even better
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Where are the UK's busiest rail stations? And how many people use them?

As the McNulty report into the state of the railways makes its recommendations today, we bring you one of the best datasets available about each of the stations we use.

From the Office of Rail Regulation, this show exactly how many people use every railway station in the UK. And how it's changed since the previous year.

The figures are based on ticket sales and they show entries (when someone gets on a train) and exits (when they get off). The total entries and exits is what gives you the number of people using the station. If any of the figures look odd, there's a hefty notes PDF from the ORR.

We've added in some figures of our own too: postcodes or geo locations for each station, plus the percentage changes over the period, which means you can map them, as we have using Google Fusion tables below (the red dots are stations where the number has gone down, the green are where passengers are going up).

So, using this dataset, you can see that Waterloo, in London, is Britain's busiest rail station with 70m entries and exits in 2009-10 - reflecting its position as a major commuter destination. But if you look at interchanges, ie, the stations where people change trains, then Clapham Junction is way in the lead with over 20m.

The dataset will also tell you Britain's least popular stations.

But what it won't give you is which stations are the most over-capacity and over-crowded. Is there another dataset we could use to work that out?

The full data is below. What can you do with it?