MORE than 1.5 million rail passengers passed through Worcester Foregate Street last year.

The station remains the busiest in the county but the number of passenger journeys still hasn’t returned to pre-Covid levels.

According to data from the Office of Rail and Road, compiled by Worcestershire County Council, 1.58m journeys were made to and from Foregate Street in 2022/23.

This is up from 1.36m last year but less than the 2.19m passengers who used the station in 2019/20.

The figures also show that 477,310 people passed through Worcester Shrub Hill in 2022/23.

Worcestershire Parkway, which opened for the first time in February 2020, had 334,658 passenger journeys last year.

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Elsewhere in the county, Kidderminster railway station was the second busiest in Worcestershire with 915,886 journeys followed by Redditch with 685,240.

The least-used station in the county was Hartlebury, with 44,184 journeys last year.

The totals are estimates based on manual station counts and ticketing data.

Worcestershire’s cabinet member for economy and skills, Adam Kent, said the county’s on-demand bus service is giving more people the chance to access their local train station.

“All of a sudden we’re injecting people into the transport system and making a huge difference,” he told an economy overview and scrutiny committee meeting on Thursday (October 3).

But he added: “I took a train from Parkway the other day, first thing, and there were no seats.

“So that’s the next problem we’ve got to deal with, but that’s the train operators.”

Worcestershire On Demand buses currently operate in two parts of the county - a ‘North Worcestershire Expansion Zone’ that includes Bromsgrove, Wychbold and Wythall, and the ‘Malvern Zone’ which covers Kempsey, Hanley Swan, Upton upon Severn and Birtsmorton.