Straight answers: Capacity on trains and the railway

• Why is my train crowded?
• Can you open new lines or lines previously closed by Beeching?
• Can you run more trains?
• Can you have double decker trains?
• Why can’t you run longer trains?
• Why don’t you add extra carriages on busy services?

In the past 20 years passenger journeys in the UK have doubled. This huge increase in demand cannot be matched by the rail network’s finite capacity – we can only run so many trains on a limited number of tracks, resulting in crowded trains.

Increasing the rail network’s capacity with major upgrades like HS2, Crossrail and Northern Powerhouse Rail will mean more trains with thousands of more seats and reduced overcrowding.

Train companies are also working together now to make journeys more comfortable and trains more frequent. We're introducing 11,300 extra services a week, 8,000 new carriages (equivalent to replacing half of the nation’s trains old for new), and upgrading hundreds more carriages to make them more comfortable.

Find out more about the new trains coming on track.

We are. We already run 31,000 more trains every week than we did 20 years ago – almost a third more - and, working together, we’re going further. Between 2017 and 2025 we're adding 11,300 extra service to weekly timetables. That’s an increase of almost 10 per cent. We are also introducing 8,000 new train carriages – equivalent to replacing half of the nation’s trains old for new.

However, Britain’s railway is one of the most congested in Europe, so we have to be careful that squeezing more trains onto the network to meet growing demand doesn’t impact on punctuality. When there are more trains packed into the network, if something goes wrong, it has bigger knock-on impacts and makes it harder to get the service back to normal. That’s one reason why transformational projects like HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail are so important.

Find out more about the new trains coming on track.

In many parts of the country that’s exactly what we are doing. Platforms have been lengthened at Waterloo station, for example, to accommodate longer trains running on the route to Reading. And Northern is introducing new, longer trains to replace aging Pacers.

Altogether, we are introducing 8,000 new train carriages between 2017-2025 – equivalent to replacing half of the nation’s trains old for new.