Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate his Department has made of the number of domestic passenger flight routes in operation in the UK that would take less than two and a half hours to complete by train.
UK domestic air routes with more than 1,000 passengers in 2019 that are within a two-and-a-half-hour range by train, as well as the number of passenger journeys on these routes in 2019, are presented in the table below.
Departure airport | Arrival airport | Domestic passengers |
Heathrow | Manchester | 283,063 |
Manchester | Heathrow | 270,044 |
Heathrow | Leeds Bradford | 50,930 |
Leeds Bradford | Heathrow | 48,953 |
Exeter | London City | 17,307 |
London City | Exeter | 15,007 |
Manchester | London City | 1,862 |
London City | Manchester | 1,325 |
The Department holds data on passenger numbers on a direct basis only. Rail journey times on routes between these cities can be variable between services and train operators, so some services could take longer than the indicative two-and-a-half-hour threshold used here.
Data on passenger movements on all UK domestic routes for 2019 are published by the Civil Aviation Authority on their website in table 12.2.