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Britain's busiest train line revealed as a route to designer outlet mall

Bicester Village  - Geoff Pugh 
Bicester Village - Geoff Pugh

Britain's busiest train line has been revealed as a route to a designer outlet mall, as discount hunters see carriages filled twice over.

A train from Oxford to London Marylebone was the most overcrowded in England and Wales last autumn, new figures have shown.

There were nearly twice as many standard class passengers as the registered capacity when the two-carriage 8.02am Chiltern Railways service arrived in the capital on a weekday, giving it a load factor of 196 per cent.

New Oxford services via Bicester have proven popular since 2016, particularly from High Wycombe, said the Department for Transport (DfT), which published the data.

Bicester is home to the designer outlet shopping centre Bicester Village, which hosts more than 160 boutiques and is popular with customers looking for bargains on luxury products.

In 2019 Bicester Village had 7.3 million guests visit the site.

The Dft said constraints on the number of available carriages limited the operator's ability to cope with rising demand.

To combat the rising tide of shoppers the May 2020 timetable introduced an extra service from High Wycombe in front of this train providing an extra 352 seats into Marylebone.

The 7.32am South Western Railway train from Woking to London Waterloo was the second most overcrowded train, said the report, with a load factor of 182 per cent when it reached its destination.

The DfT stated that the 10 most overcrowded trains represent "a small fraction of all services" and some of the figures are based on a single count.