Brussels-North is Belgium’s busiest station with 61,000 passengers per day

Brussels-North remains Belgium's busiest railway station with more than 61,000 passengers a day, according to new figures from Belgian railway company SNCB.

Using a new and more accurate counting method, Brussels’ three main stations remained the busiest in the country: Brussels North (61,362 daily weekday passengers), Brussels Midi (60,647) and Brussels Central (60,595).

Belgium’s quietest station is Hourpes in Hainaut province, which is used by just seven train passengers per weekday.

SNCB previously counted the number of passengers at stations manually during a week in October in order to gather the data. Now that virtually all tickets and season tickets are scanned, the railway company has enough data to reliably count passenger numbers per station digitally.

This method also provides a much more representative picture, according to SNCB, with an average figure for a full year rather than figures based on a single week.

The next busiest stations were Gent-Sint-Pieters (56,779), Antwerp-Central (38,681), Leuven (37,379) and Mechelen (23,621). Liège-Guillemins, in eighth place, is the first Walloon station in the ranking: on a weekday, an average of 22,991 people board the train there.

There are a total of 17 stations where an average of more than 10,000 passengers board trains on weekdays, including Namur, Bruges, Antwerp-Berchem, Ottignies, Charleroi Central, Brussels Airport, Kortrijk, Mons and Denderleeuw.

During weekends, Brussels-Midi is the busiest station in the country with, on average, 32,509 passengers boarding on a Saturday. Just behind is Gent-Sint-Pieters with 31,905 passengers.

The list also shows almost 100 stations where, on weekdays, an average of fewer than 100 passengers board per day.

Last year, SNCB carried 207.8 million paying passengers - an average of 740,431 per day on weekdays, 306,888 on Saturdays and 264,090 on Sundays.