Reported on by BBC Radio 5, the small Cambridgeshire railway station of Shippea Hill receives only twelve passengers each year. This makes it the least used station in Britain, according to new research. In contrast London’s Waterloo station has about 20 passengers every 10 seconds.
The fact about Shippea Hill has come from David Brewer, a man who has undertaken the mission to photograph every railway station in the U.K. Brewer’s exploits were featured on a Digital Journal article published earlier this year. Brewer presented his research to the BBC and selecting Shippea Hill, which opened in 1845, as one of his favorites.
Five quietest railway stations in the U.K.:
1. Shippea Hill (Cambridgeshire) – 12 (entries or exits in 2015-16)
2. Reddish South (Greater Manchester) – 38
3. Pilning (Gloucestershire) – 46
4. Coombe Junction Halt (Cornwall) – 48
5. Barry Links (Angus) – 68
Shippea Hill is operated by the Greater Anglia rail company, on the Breckland Line, and it is located near to the city of Ely. The line runs between the city of Cambridge in the west and the city of Norwich in the east. The station has the status of a a request stop, meaning that a train passing through will never stop at the station unless a passenger requests it. Here opportunities are limited, with only one train per day authorized to stop at the station to allow passengers on or off the train. There’s no train at all on Sundays.
Five busiest railway stations in the U.K.:
1. London Waterloo – 99,148,388
2. London Victoria – 81,151,418
3. London Liverpool Street – 66,556,690
4. London Bridge – 53,850,938
5. London Euston – 41,677,870
As well as the BBC featured, the station was also visited this year by reported Simon Usborne of The Guardian. Usborne described the station: “It’s hard to imagine a more desolate place to get off a train. Shipping containers for sale stand in a muddy yard behind the far platform, opposite the pitched-roof signal box, now shuttered. Otherwise the view is of field after field, some showing maize stumps, others now peat-black and ploughed.”
While Shippea Hill is the least used station, the hardest to visit, according to David Brewer, is Redcar British Steel. This train station is only used by employees of a steel works. There are only two services per day, running in opposite directions
