It was interesting the see the number of stations being "upgraded" from small to medium & large. Certainly are a lot more large stations popping up in recent years.

I'd be curious to know what "large" means though. Is it just the passenger throughput or is it the number of platforms? It would be quite impressive if each of these size increases represents a major construction project.

Seems to just be based on passenger numbers, according to the boxes that appear if you hover on a station they are:

Small: Less than 100,000

Medium: 100,000 to 5,000,000

Large: 5,000,000+

An unstaffed station local to me went from small to medium over the maps period and it hasn't had any major work done.

Transport is one of my "pet" hobbies. This sort of hard data, on it's own is interesting. Combined with census data, local authority housing development data, and car use, then it becomes powerful. Even bring in the price of oil however this will have a general impact on the whole network.

The problem, as ever, is stitching it all together.

Curious. When you say "powerful" , in what way do you mean? For what purpose? What i mean to ask is, in what way does it become powerful for you personally?

Government doesn't seem to think so, given that they've talked about scrapping the 10 yearly census, which has been going on since 1801, during both of the last 2.

I love the visualization here - but I'm not quite sure what it's showing me.

Is the increase compared to the starting point, or is it a year on year change?

I'm also unsure as to whether the white colour was the best choice for the largest change group - my mind was instantly associating it with a small change, for whatever reason/

According to the label, it's year on year. The slider should have two control points so you can view any interval.

Are you sure? The homepage says "Scroll, zoom and click on individual stations to see how passenger numbers have changed since 1997". I think it's for the whole period.

Many stations are white at the end, but have no reason for the increase to have been in the final year. Picking one I used to travel through [1], it's white on the map, last year's increase was <10%, but the increase since 1997 is huge.

(Also, this is Great Britain, since Northern Ireland isn't included.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Bridge_railway_station

Yeah I noticed that too. The glowing red embers turn white hot with increase ...mostly towards the end. Because we're comparing with 1997 levels. I suppose that shows the general trend well, but it's not so good for actually spotting patterns of change as the time slider moves.

It's surely for the whole period. Even the fastest-growing stations could not sustain 500% growth, year after year!

Do you know of a dataset showing station locations and distance by rail from neighbouring/other stations?

I need to map stations and distance from ${CITY} (London in this case) but haven't found the data yet.

May not be quite what you're looking for, but perhaps mapumental may help (depending on why you want the data)

https://mapumental.com/

It gives you time (not distance) between places, and it includes trains as well as buses. But perhaps you could use their API to tweak the results: https://github.com/mysociety/mapumental-scripts

Failing that, maybe try the NPTDR dataset: https://data.gov.uk/dataset/nptdr (again, times, not distances)

You may be interested in the NaPTAN (National Public Transport Access Nodes) data which is available for free from https://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan and will give you lat/long coordinates among other things for every public transport station/stop in Great Britain.

"There is a NaPTAN record for every bus stop, railway station, airport, ferry terminal etc. in England, Scotland and Wales. Record attributes include co-ordinates (OSGR and Lat-Long)..."

Why is Northern Ireland transport not represented on this map? Otherwise the title should be 'Map of rail station usage in England, Scotland and Wales"

Northern Ireland's railways are managed by a different government agency to Great Britain's, so the statistics are not included.

I'd say Great Britain, but I guess you can out-pedant me with that, since Angelsey, the Isle of Wight etc have railways.

http://www.translink.co.uk/Services/NI-Railways/ (I think, though I've never been to NI)

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/

Great Britain is correct, no? If one were referring to the island one would just say Britain.

Great Britain is the name of the island, as distinct from the other Britain (Brittany, France) which is slightly smaller in area.

No-one ever refers to Brittany as Britain, but the anachronism remains.

On that matter, I realized recently that both Brittany and Great Britain have an area called Cornwall or Cornouaille in French which makes the matter more confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornouaille

Agreed, title is (if slightly pedantically) inaccurate - although I'd recommend "Usage in Great Britain"

Statistics available from: https://www.drdni.gov.uk/articles/northern-ireland-road-and-...

No data on the island of Sodor?

Shame they used such similar shades of red.