Britain’s most crime-infested train stations can today be named and shamed – and they probably aren’t where you think.
analysis found a tiny station situated deep in the Welsh countryside tops the table.
Johnston, an unstaffed stop in the Pembrokeshire village of the same name, saw 10 crimes in 2024, according to British Transport Police (BTP) figures.
Four of these were violent crimes, which might include fistfights and stabbings.
Although barely any crimes were committed at Johnston, it logged the UK’s highest rate – 1,440 per million passengers – because of its low footfall.
Just 7,000 passengers used the station in 2024, the equivalent of 19 a day.
‘s analysis, involving all of the around 2,580 terminals in Britain, comes as crime on the transport network hit a record high last year.
Almost 80,000 offences were recorded by the BTP in 2023/24.
Violent crimes and sex offences have both soared to all-time highs, doubling in the last ten years.
Overall, levels are 55 per cent up on a decade earlier.
In a case that exposed how rife crime is at UK train stations, a gang of teenage girls were filmed attacking train staff, passengers and police in a booze-fuelled rampage at Barnham Station, West Sussex last Easter.
The five girls, the youngest of which was 13, were spared prison, despite throwing punches, headbutts and ripping out the hair of victims.
One girl held up a clump of hair from the head of a rail passenger like a trophy during the hour-long melee, a court heard.
All five admitted affray and assaults on train staff, police and members of the public. The judge said they would have been jailed if they had been old enough.
When taking into account raw numbers of crimes, London St Pancras International topped the charts (1,616) of our analysis.
But 38.5million passengers use the stop every year, according to figures held by the Office for Road and Rail (OfRR).
After Johnston, the second most dangerous station was Redbridge, on the outskirts of Southampton (1,180 crimes per million passengers).
Redbridge, operated by South Western Railway, saw 38 crimes last year, against its passenger count of more than 32,000.
The plurality (13) of crimes were vehicle related, likely break-ins of cars and vans at its four-space car park.
Small stations dominate the top of our table.
Tiverton Parkway – on the busy Bristol to Exeter line in mid-Devon – is the first large station to feature on our list, ranking fourth.
In 2024, 484 crimes were reported there against its 581,000 footfall, giving a rate of 830 per million passengers.
Nearly half of these reports (219) were theft. Another 84 were shoplifting, presumably from the shops and cafes at the platforms.
Technically, Ince and Elton Station in Cheshire saw the highest rate of 11,600 crimes per million passengers — but it only saw one offence committed.
It served 86 passengers on an extremely limited ‘parliamentary service’, meaning just one crime highly inflates the rate.
Because of this, we have not calculated crime rates for stations which had fewer than five crimes and fewer than 10,000 passengers.
Stations with more than five crimes and fewer than 10,000 footfall, or vice versa, are included in the rankings.
We calculated footfall by summing the entries, exits and interchanges at a station, as reported by the OfRR.
It comes after 19-year-old mother Stephanie Marie was stabbed to death in front of commuters by her boyfriend Jason Flore, 26, after an angry confrontation at Crawley Station, West Sussex, last August.
Chilling CCTV caught the moment the murderer, who plunged a 20cm knife into the heart of the mother of his child, casually walked his dog just moments later.
Within the 45 minutes between the murder and the arrest, Flore disposed of crucial evidence which included his blooded tracksuit bottoms.
And last November, a ‘lively and outgoing’ grandmother was ‘senselessly’ attacked at Birmingham New Street Station, one of the country’s busiest transport hubs.
Dorothy Chiles, 87, died at home six weeks later, just two days after Christmas, after being suffering a broken hip and being discharged from hospital.
Police said last week that a woman in her 20s was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.
A BTP spokesperson said: ‘Every offence is one too many, and while we understand the concern that we recorded more total crimes last year, it’s important to understand these figures within their context. The chance of becoming a victim of crime on the railway remains extremely low, and reports of high harm crime such as robbery and violence remain low at 2.2 incidents per million passenger journeys.
‘Crucially, we know that these figures are influenced in part by more and more people having the confidence to report things like sexual harassment to us, and through the abundance of daily intelligence-led proactive operations taking place right across the railway network in England, Scotland and Wales. For example, in just one week alone in November our County Lines Taskforce arrested 65 people and seized 42 weapons through proactive deployments, and stop and search is at its highest use in BTP since 2010, with a 50% positive find rate in the last nine months.
‘It is also important not to sensationalise crime rate data. Stations like Johnston appear to have a high crime rate because they have a low number of crimes recorded combined with a low footfall of passengers, but with less than one crime recorded per month it’s simply incorrect to say that passengers are at greater risk of crime at these stations.’