Brussels-North railway station is the busiest train station in the country on weekdays. With 59,068 boarding passengers every weekday last year, it maintained its position welcoming as many passengers as the 300 smallest stations combined. The figures come from a passenger counting operation conducted by Belgium’s state-owned railway company NMBS last October.
The capital's two other main railway stations complete the top 3: Brussels-South and Brussels-Central. They each counted over 58,300 passengers boarding every weekday. Brussels-South is the country’s busiest station at the weekend.
On weekdays the Sint-Pieters station in Ghent is in 4th position with an average of 48,885 passengers boarding every weekday. This is followed by two other stations in Flanders - Antwerp-Centraal (38,611) and Leuven (31,230). Only then do the first Walloon stations appear in the list: Liege-Guillemins (22,060) and Namur (21,973).
At the bottom of the list are nearly 30 stations where fewer than 50 passengers board trains on weekdays. The lowest number of passengers per day were counted in the Hainaut stops Hourpes (5), Maubray (10) and Beignée (13). The quietest station in Flanders on weekdays is that of Aalst-Kerrebroek (East Flanders, 15 travellers per day).
The passenger counts are carried out every year in October. The railway company insists that the counts, which are still done manually, form the only source of data that truly allows the company to determine the number of passengers boarding per station and long-term evolutions. The railway company concedes the counts are ‘the result of a short observation period, which inevitably implies there’s a margin of error, which can be considerable in some cases’.