While living outside London can offer a quieter life and more green space, there is one inescapable ritual for city workers implied in the name of a commuter town.
It’s bad enough being cooped up with hundreds of sweaty, bad-tempered people on a train to work, but to then find that you must endure the experience without a seat is enough to ruin a morning.
New data from the Department for Transport shows that, on a typical weekday, more than 300,000 people were forced to stand for their commutes into major cities.
Your chances of finding a seat are by far the worst travelling into London, where one in four passengers (27 per cent) were found to be standing during peak hours. This is an all-time high for the capital.
Significantly fewer passengers had to stand going into all the other major cities in the country, at just one in 20.
These stats, based on typical weekdays in autumn last year, show that 1,920,000 people commuted into a big city each morning – London in two-thirds of cases.Â
Topping the list of the most overcrowded journeys of 20 minutes or more was a Thameslink train from Bedford to St Pancras International.
The service arriving at St Pancras at 8.09am carried an average of 76 per cent more passengers than their 650 seating capacity. This means almost half the people on that train were forced to stand.
More than 300,000 passengers are forced to stand up on their commute on a typical day, new data shows
Quarter of an hour later, the 8.24am service was also in the top five most crowded journeys in the country, with 55 per cent more passengers than seats.
Coming in at second was the 17.46pm West Midlands train out from London Euston to Crewe, on which there were 70 per cent more people than seats when it left.
Then came a Transport for Wales train from Bridgend to Rhymney, which picks up commuters from Cardiff after work, with 61 per cent too many passengers.
This was the only commute outside London to make the top ten.
In fourth place was the South Western service from Alton to London Waterloo, with 55 per cent too many passengers when it arrived at 8.22am.
Overall, about one in three services carried more passengers than seats during peak times.
For trains to and from London, this increased to more than half of services.Â
More people caught morning trains into major cities in 2025 compared to 2024 – around four per cent more – and the number catching trains out of major cities grew by three per cent.
The busiest service was a train from Bedford arriving at St Pancras International (pictured) at 8:09am
Despite this, a greater proportion of them had seats. The excess of passengers greater than the number of seats decreased to 1.1 per cent.
That’s because the overall number of seats available on trains in and out of major cities increased by a significant amount – four per cent nationwide.
The Liberal Democrats said the latest statistics showed commuters were not getting value for money on the ‘extortionate’ railways.
Olly Glover, the party’s transport spokesperson, said: ‘Rail travel should be easy and affordable, yet we are still lumped with an embarrassingly poor service across our rail network, with passengers paying extortionate prices and not even getting a seat on peak trains.
‘If Andy Burnham is serious about connecting and growing our regions, he must, at the very least, restore services back to pre-pandemic timetables and train capacity.’
The Department for Transport said: ‘The vast majority of passengers — 98.9 per cent — typically travel on services that are not overcrowded.
‘Where there are pinch points during peak hours, work is under way to improve capacity.Â
‘GTR [Govia Thameslink Railway] has added carriages to its busiest commuter services, while South Western Railway has boosted capacity by nearly 30 per cent in the last year with new trains.Â
‘Timetable changes are also being introduced across the network, with nationalised operators adding 76,000 extra seats per week.’
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