The Great British Railway

Since 1994 the number of passengers traveling on Britain's trains has increased by 135%. However some stations have actually seen decreases in passenger numbers. The Centre for Towns has released an interactive map which shows which stations in Britain have seen an increase in passenger numbers and which have seen a decrease in the last five years.

The Centre for Towns Trains map uses data from the Office for Rail and Road to show passenger numbers at every train station in England, Scotland & Wales. The stations represented by blue markers are those that have seen a decrease in passenger numbers since 2011/2012. The red markers show the stations that have seen an increase in passenger numbers.


Two years ago the Campaign for Better Transport released a similar interactive map showing the huge increase in rail traffic in Great Britain between 1997 and 2015. The Rail Travel Station Usage 1997-2015 map visualizes annual rail passenger traffic for each year from 1997 to 2015. In those 18 years rail traffic in Great Britain increased by 1.45 billion annual passenger journeys.

The Rail Travel Station Usage map shows which stations have seen the biggest increase in traffic and which stations have seen a drop in traffic in the 18 years after 1997. The map uses the CartoDB Torque library to animate through all 18 years of passenger traffic. The circular station map markers are sized to represent the size of the station (amount of passenger traffic). The color of the circles indicates the scale of the increase (or decrease) in passenger traffic over the visualized 18 years.

The Centre for Towns has created a number of other interactive transit maps. These includes maps showing the flow of buses and cars on Britain's road network. The maps can be viewed on the Centre for Towns Maps page.