Which long-established stations are showing good patronage growth?

[railfan99]

From previous discussion, Wiki volunteers won't update the patronage figures for individual railway stations until November 2026, after the latest 2025-26 financial year statistics become available from the Office of Rail and Road.

When looking at Axminster station's figures for the years to 2024-25. I was very pleased to see passenger numbers on a continual upward trend.

For stations that opened prior to 2021, which ones do you believe are experiencing reasonable growth in passenger numbers?

Are there factors that have led to this, such as new housing developments, introduction of more frequent trains, improvements in bus connections, the commencement of a rail competitor such as Lumo, a higher number of car parking spaces, reconstruction of a station to make it more user-friendly such as by installing lifts, the reopening of a line such as more recently at Okehampton or something else?

 

[LowLevel]

Lincoln and Hykeham following a series of improvements to services - two trains an hour on the Nottingham line all day and direct services to London. Hykeham has also had an increase in local businesses with a lot of rail commuters.

 

[railfan99]

Impressive: Hykeham has gone from a total of 113,000 joining and alighting passengers in 2022/23 to 209,000 in 2024/25. That's equivalent on a 365 days per year calculation to about 286 boarding and 286 alighting passengers, though probably higher on Mondays to Saturdays given the lower overall train frequency on Sundays.

Lincoln hasn't experienced quite the same percentage increase but still a very worthwhile rise that must be way in excess of population growth for this city of c.130,000. I have been through it as have travelled by rail to Cleethorpes and Barton-on-Humber, but need to stay overnight in future.

 

[zwk500]

@railfan99, the ORR Data Portal https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/ is the original source of the passenger numbers in wiki

The historic series of the station usage data is available here: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/estimates-of-station-usage, it is open data so it's free to download and then you can manipulate it in excel or other tools as you like.

The page also includes the snapshot sheets of each data release to make quick comparisons of.

 

[Magdalia]

There was a long discussion after publication of the 2024/25 dataset which is here:

ORR estimates of station usage 2024/25

The Office for Rail and Road (ORR) have now announced the publication date for the estimates of station usage 2024/25. This will be on 4 December.

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