The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ of the Bentham Line

Bentham Line passenger numbers continue to increase

The Office of Road and Rail recently published their estimates of passenger entries and exits at all national railway stations for the financial year 2025/26. The figures for the Bentham Line, and other routes, show encouraging increases in passengers at all our stations.

Table A, shows the numbers of passengers for each of the Bentham Line stations along with the most popular destination and origin point for the station.

Table A

Table B shows the comparisons between the latest 2024-25 figures and the previous financial year 2023-24. All Bentham Line stations have, for the first year since the Covid pandemic, shown an increase in the number of passengers.

Table B

Table C compares pre and post pandemic passenger number and highlights the resilience of our rural communities.

Table C

It must be near to Christmas, as the annual station ‘footfall’ figures have just arrived from the Office of Road and Rail. These cover the financial year from 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2026.

Whilst we can’t compete with the top performing station London Liverpool Street with 98,000,000 entries and exits, none of the Bentham Line stations is near to the low usage of Elton & Orston station in Nottinghamshire, where there were only 68 ins and outs.

All of the stations between Heysham Port and Leeds showed an increase on the previous year. Bentham, Hellifield and Gargrave all hit the 40,000 mark for the first time. It is with noting that Bentham has far fewer passenger services daily than the other two stations. Lancaster and Leeds remain the most popular destinations on the route, but many journeys show changes of trains at these stations for destinations across the UK.

Our rural stations continue to demonstrate the best recovery with many of them surpassing pre-Covid passenger numbers in the 2023-24 financial year.  

Carnforth and Skipton have now exceeded the pre-Covid figures in the 2024-25 financial year for the first time, whilst the stations on the more rural section of the line continue to see the best growth, as more people take journeys for leisure purposes, with Bentham continuing to lead the charge.

Passengers between Lancaster and Heysham Port continue to see disruption to their local services, particularly on Sundays.The number of journeys to and from our West Yorkshire stations continue to improve but still have some way to go to reach pre-Covid levels.

With the even larger numbers of passengers seen on the trains this summer we can look forward optimistically to seeing a further increases in the Bentham Line’s figures for 2025-26.