The St Helens projectWhen did Newton-le-Willows overtake?
Rank ten stations each year, find the change of leader, then test whether it can be trusted.
The learner downloads the ORR's station usage table and keeps the ten rows whose local authority is St. Helens. Each row holds 28 yearly estimates of entries and exits, from April 1997 to March 2025. Before ranking anything, three kinds of blank need handling. The whole year from April 2003 is marked [x], because no data were collected. Lea Green is marked [z], not applicable, for its first three years. And one column heading carries [b], a break in the series. A program that treats these markers as zero will invent a year in which nobody travelled.
St Helens Central against Newton-le-Willows, entries and exits, ORR Table 1415a, our Python run, 28 September 2026| Year (April to March) | St Helens Central | Newton-le-Willows | Newton as a share of Central |
|---|
| 1997 to 1998 | 370,097 | 154,170 | 0.42 |
| 2012 to 2013 | 674,018 | 670,938 | 0.995 |
| 2013 to 2014 | 1,096,844 | 711,462 | 0.65 |
| 2017 to 2018 | 1,301,484 | 806,926 | 0.62 |
| 2018 to 2019 | 657,274 | 794,928 | 1.21 |
| 2024 to 2025 | 669,452 | 1,106,560 | 1.65 |
A simple loop that finds the top station each year reports the first change of leader in the year to March 2019. But look at how it happened. Newton-le-Willows barely moved that year, down 1.5%. St Helens Central fell by 49.5%, from 1,301,484 to 657,274, in a single year. Five years earlier the reverse had happened: Central jumped 62.7% while Newton rose 6.0%, pushing Central far ahead just after the two had been within 3,080 journeys of each other. Changes that big, at one station only, can come from the way the figures are estimated rather than from passengers. This file does not say why either jump happened, so the learner flags both rather than explaining them.
The fairer comparison is the ratio of the two stations in the same year. When a change hits every station at once, the ratio hardly moves: in the year to March 2009 the borough total leapt from 1,860,202 to 3,410,274, yet the ratio only slipped from 0.88 to 0.82. Station-only jumps are different, and they are exactly where the ratio swings. So the honest summary is that Newton-le-Willows had been closing in for fifteen years, was level by 2012 to 2013, and has led clearly since 2018 to 2019, with a gap now wide enough, 1.65 to 1, that no single odd year explains it. In the latest year it carries 33.7% of the borough's journeys, and just five of the ten stations make up 80%.
Ages 8 to 11
Rank the class by a weekly score and see how one odd week can change the leader.
Ages 11 to 15
Load the ten stations in Python, handle the markers, and rank each year.
Ages 15 and up
Separate shared jumps from station-only jumps and test the leader change properly.
ORR figures, our rankings
Station figures come from the Office of Rail and Road's Table 1415a, Estimates of station usage. The rankings, ratios and every comparison on this page are our own calculation.
