u/AussieWirraway

I got some good feedback and discussion from my last post on the busiest railway lines, so I wanted to expand it by looking at individual stations. In 2025 the Adelaide rail network had 14 million passengers, and this is how each station preformed.

The top 3 busiest suburban train stations are: (excluding Adelaide)

1. Seaford
2. Mawson Lakes
3. Salisbury

Together, the busiest 1/3 of stations represent about 80% of rail patronage!

Network wide, just 6 stations receive more than 900 daily passengers

65 stations have fewer than 300 daily passengers

13 stations have fewer than 100 daily passengers

Kudla is the quietest full-time station, and receives just 31 daily passengers, or 11,200 a year

DIT publishes a dataset of all Adelaide Metro validations each quarter, and here is the estimated validations by corridor based on Q4 2025 data (with the help of vibe coding 😉). According to the DIT 24-25FY annual report, annual rail ridership was 14,646,651 for reference (Q4 ridership is lower than other quarters due to the impact of December holidays)

Deciding in which corridors to amalgamate is a challenge. Some Seaford trains stop at 'Flinders line' stations during the peak & off peak, but it does have 3 unique stations and a strong terminus. Grange & Port Dock is a little easier as they mostly share stations, with almost all Outer Harbor trains express between Woodville and Adelaide.

Regardless, both the Gawler & Seaford line are the best performers, with Gawler services just edging out Seaford patronage (though the Seaford line would come out on top if we could attribute Seaford/Flinders validations with any accuracy).

The Belair line is unsurprisingly in last place thanks to its slow route and poor frequencies. If you have any other suggestions for public transport patronage analysis, let me know!

Tonight at 7:30pm the r /melbournetrains discord server, myself and Adam are discussing the soon-to-enter-service X'trapolis 2.0. After being invited by the project team to check out the XT2 last week, I am keen to field any questions, queries and comments for this new fleet!