The cost of not being able to plan
A ticket from London to Edinburgh costs £25 if you book twelve weeks out and £204.80 if you walk up on the day. Same seat, same train. The difference is not distance or fuel — it is whether your life is schedulable.
Two modes are subsidised. It is not the train.
The railway gets about £11.9bn a year of public support, and that number gets called unaffordable. The fuel duty freeze has cost the Exchequer £133bn since 2011 — more per year than the railway — and is almost never described as a subsidy at all. Aviation pays no fuel duty and charges no VAT; domestic Air Passenger Duty is £8.
Sources: OBR fuel duty figures, ORR industry finance, HMRC APD rates. The full working is in our research on where power actually sits.
Which station is yours?
Add your postcode and we will show the stations nearest you, how many people use them, and where most of those people are going.
Sign in and add your postcodeWhere people cannot choose not to travel
Season tickets as a share of all journeys. A high share means a station most of whose users are committed commuters — the places where a fare rise is not a discretionary cost, because there is no version of the month where they do not go.
| Station | Season share | Journeys | Busiest journey from here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hagley West Midlands |
74% | 494,246 | Kidderminster |
| Digby and Sowton South West |
62% | 968,412 | Exeter Central |
| Birchington-On-Sea South East |
52% | 350,024 | Ramsgate |
| Frizinghall Yorkshire and The Humber |
49% | 433,232 | Leeds |
| Neilston Scotland |
48% | 375,994 | Glasgow Central |
| East Worthing South East |
47% | 470,512 | Brighton |
| Liphook South East |
46% | 608,654 | London Waterloo |
| Burley-In-Wharfedale Yorkshire and The Humber |
46% | 606,872 | Ilkley |
| Stourbridge Town West Midlands |
45% | 378,582 | Kidderminster |
| Ingatestone East of England |
44% | 779,214 | London Liverpool Street |
The busiest stations in Britain
| Station | Journeys | Operator | Busiest journey from here |
|---|---|---|---|
| London Liverpool Street | 98,015,658 | Network Rail | Tottenham Court Road |
| London Waterloo | 70,389,546 | Network Rail | Clapham Junction |
| London Paddington | 69,897,084 | Network Rail | Tottenham Court Road |
| Tottenham Court Road | 68,133,826 | London Underground | London Liverpool Street |
| London Bridge | 54,685,648 | Network Rail | East Croydon |
| London Victoria | 53,784,358 | Network Rail | Gatwick Airport |
| Stratford (London) | 51,473,518 | Elizabeth line | London Liverpool Street |
| Farringdon | 50,171,290 | London Underground | London Liverpool Street |
| Bond Street | 42,752,242 | London Underground | Tottenham Court Road |
| London Euston | 40,248,974 | Network Rail | Milton Keynes Central |
Office of Rail and Road estimates of station usage for 2024-25, covering 2,589 stations and 3,065 million journeys, joined to Department for Transport NaPTAN location data. We could place 2,567 of them on a map. The rest are stations whose names the two datasets do not agree on — several are new, and a few share an unqualified name with a different station elsewhere in the country, where we would rather show nothing than guess wrong. They are counted in the totals here, but cannot be found by distance.