Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what change in passenger capacity there has been at Waterloo station in the last 10 years.

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

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