London’s quietest train station where there are no trains at the weekend

We’re lucky to have so many fabulous transport options in London, but it’s no secret that navigating certain stations can be exasperating.

Take Liverpool Street for instance, great links to the east of England but a nightmare to get through at peak times. So it’ll come as no surprise that the station has just been named London’s busiest, with a whopping 94.5 million passengers using it in 2024, according to the Office of Rail and Road.

At the other end of the scale, Sudbury & Harrow Road has been revealed as London’s quietest train station. 

The Greater London station only served 18,680 Chiltern Railways passengers between April 2023 and March 2024, and according to recent data passenger numbers are declining. 

In the 12 months leading up to March 2023, there had been 19,778 people going through the station’s barriers. 

Dwindling passenger numbers are perhaps due to the lack of trains that depart from the station. Sudbury & Harrow Road operates a peak-only service, with just eight trains calling there a day on the way to and from London Marylebone.

So that’s four trains in the morning to Marylebone, and four back in the afternoon/evening, with no trains after 19:33.

And if you were thinking of travelling on the weekends, don’t bother, as no trains stop there at all on Saturdays or Sundays.

The reason for this is that the station is located on a two-track line which is predominantly used for fast trains heading to Oxford and Birmingham. As such, there aren’t many times when trains are able to stop along the line during the day. 

Local councillors campaigned unsuccessfully for more services to run from the station, with a petition launched in 2022 to bring a weekend service and up to four trains an hour to the station for Sudbury residents.

Brent Councillor Thomas Stephens, a Sudbury ward member, told the Brent & Kilburn Times that the decision not to add more trains was a ‘huge missed opportunity for Wembley’.

In response to the petition, Chiltern Railways said: ‘Many stations on the Chiltern line do not benefit from the variety of strong public transport alternatives to the rail network seen in London.

‘If we were to increase the number of trains that call at Sudbury & Harrow Road this would cause considerable disbenefits to our wider customer base or require very significant investment in infrastructure and more trains.’