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Waterloo Station

Answer

The Waterloo Capacity Enhancement programme has lengthened suburban platforms to accommodate 10-car length trains and provide an additional five platforms at Waterloo by bringing the former International Terminal platforms back into regular use. This has enabled an increase in seat capacity on trains at Waterloo.

The Department for Transport (DfT) publishes data on seat capacity on central London arrivals and departures by rail on a typical autumn weekday. This data was first published for 2011 and the latest published data is for 2018, as presented in the table below.

Table 1: Total seats available on a typical autumn weekday at Vauxhall (for Waterloo) 2011 to 2018

Year	Total seats	Percentage change from previous year
2011	700,825
2012	707,218	0.9%
2013	707,138	0.0%
2014	717,848	1.5%
2015	723,407	0.8%
2016	736,370	1.8%
2017	737,791	0.2%
2018	809,166	9.7%

Notes:

1. Where a city has more than one station in the city centre along the same route, the seating capacity into the city centre is counted on arrival at the first city centre station the train called at, and the seating capacity departing from the city centre is counted on departure from the final city centre station the train called at. The seating capacity for London Waterloo trains will therefore be the total seating capacity at Vauxhall.

2. For the production of DfT’s rail crowding statistics, some peak trains are also given a standing allowance to reflect additional standing capacity for shorter journeys. Standing capacity has not been included in the table above.

Train capacity (total seats) for central London arrivals and departures by rail on a typical autumn weekday by station and timeband are available in Table RAI0203 at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/rai02-capacity-and-overcrowding

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

8220

Session

2019-19

Subjects

Waterloo Station

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk