The most popular route is between London and Manchester (Image: Getty)
The most popular route in the UK last year has been revealed – and it is between London and Manchester.
The route has around 74 trains running daily and the fastest take just over two hours, while the average journey time is around two and a half hours. It is the UK’s busiest according to Trainline.
The shortest and most direct route is Euston to Piccadilly and lines are run by Avanti West Coast, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, First TransPennine Express, Northern Rail, South Western Railway and West Midlands Trains.
That was not the only popular route, with those to Stockport, Chester, Glasgow, Oxford, and Cardiff all seeing an increase in customers of between 21% and 26%.
The busiest in UK is once again London Liverpool Street, the terminus of Greater Anglia services and a major connection for the Elizabeth Line. It had 94.5 million entries and exits – up by 14 million last year.
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74 trains run the route daily on the route (Image: Getty)
Sakshi Anand, VP of growth and UK GM, at Trainline, said: “It’s fantastic to see so many people committing to more train travel next year, and great to see so many of our popular destinations seeing year on year increases.
“With cost savings and environmental sensitivities being two of the biggest drivers for bringing more people on to trains in 2025, we hope to continue to see more people choosing diverse destinations and taking the opportunity to explore more of the UK by train.”
Birmingham New Street in the West Midlands is the busiest station outside London, with 33.3 million entries and exits.
It’s followed by Manchester and Leeds, with a lot of the other stations being urban stations – except .
New research from Trainline revealed that a third of Brits (32%) are planning to take the train more in 2025 than they did in 2024, with Gen-Zers (46%) and Londoners (43%) leading the way.
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Cost savings, more convenient travel options, faster journeys and being kinder to the environment were cited as the top reasons for this increase.
Over the course of 2024, Trainline customers saved over a million tonnes of carbon dioxide by choosing to take the train, the equivalent of planting over 85 billion trees or 13,164 people being vegan for life.
As more companies introduced return to office policies, Trainline saw more than 8,500 passengers take the same train at the same time of day more than 100 times, spending almost a third of their year on their most used route.
Almost 10,000 travellers visited over 100 different stations in 2024, and 37 departed at every single minute past the hour.