September 19th - The top ten most crowded trains list is out

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Commuting can be no fun if you happen to use the morning rush-hour trains from Bedford to London. Here's the top 10 most crowded trains in England and Wales, just published. But the most concerning point of the new Department for Transport (DfT) figures is the degree of undercrowding, with barely half of seats filled on the average peak-hour service.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 19th of September.
0:09.6	Today I would like to talk about the bedpan line. And if you're not familiar with that, it is the much maligned journey from Bedford, about 50 miles north of London,
0:25.6	to St. Pancras Station in the capital. In the olden days when it was a smelly old,
0:34.0	unreliable diesel train, it was called the Bedpan line. Now it's been transformed into
0:42.4	Thameslink and there are pretty regular departures on the line that go through Luton Airport
0:50.6	Parkway which has a snazzy new connection to the airport.
0:55.1	Through London St. Pancras International, where you can change for, well, for example,
1:00.9	Eurostar to Paris. It also calls at Farringdon, now on the Elizabeth line, giving lots of
1:08.7	opportunities, and then goes through London Brack Friars destination if you want to head for example to Tate Modern onto London Bridge and then continue south to Gatwick Airport and Brighton. It is a pretty popular train. Actually, some of them are too popular, like the 733 from Bedford
1:33.4	via Luton Airport to London St. Pancras International. I've just been going through some
1:40.4	just released figures from the Department for Transport,
1:44.4	which shows that on the final stretch into London, St. Pancras International,
1:49.1	the train had more passengers standing than seated,
1:53.3	a maximum load factor of 204%.
1:57.0	I calculate that means there were 537 passengers who were obliged to stand on the average train.
2:05.9	Thameslink says that those trains have now been extended. This was actually the figures for
2:10.8	autumn 2023 and now there's an average of only 187 passengers standing. Bedford to St. Pancras makes an appearance
2:21.9	three times in the list of the most overcrowded trains in England and Wales, appearing at
2:32.7	first place, sixth place and tenth place.
2:36.3	So what about the others?
2:37.5	Well, Chilton Railways has a couple, notably second place, the 746am departure from Princess Risborough in Buckinghamshire.
2:48.1	The final leg of the journey has almost two-thirds more passengers than there
	...

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