Busy Stations

For most of 2012 I was commuting to work into Waterloo station, apparently the busiest station in London (and busy enough during rush hour, making that the busiest station in the UK. And that should be pretty busy, given how packed the train and tube network are. So it was pretty revealing to see that there was no UK station in this list of top 51 busiest train stations in the world. As an example, somewhere I'm more than familiar with, Osaka Umeda, gets an annual 820,000,000 passengers per year and it's 4th on the list. First of all, holy crap that's a huge number of people. But compare that with the comparatively puny 82,000,000 per year in Waterloo (according to the Transport for London website). Even my old commuting spot of Sannomiya in Kobe (a city less that a quarter of the size of London) is high on the list at 16 with 240,000,000. It really goes to show how the Japanese train network is on a whole other level to that of practically anywhere in Europe. The highest ranking station in Europe is Paris Gare-du-Nord at 190,000,000. And all but six of the stations on the list are in Japan - number one is Shinjuku, Tokyo with a whopping 1.2 billion passengers a year. Link via Digg.com Update: So there was a further post here with a full list of the busiest 100 stations and Waterloo makes it in at 91. 91!