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Rail Passengers

Map No. 30

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In 2003 2.2 trillion kilometres were travelled by train passengers. Of this total a fifth were in India, a fifth were in China, and a tenth were in Japan.

The world average for the number of kilometres travelled by people per year by train is 358 kilometres each. The unevenness of the real distribution of kilometres travelled is highlighted by the fact that 64 territories (out of 200) do not have a rail system. At the other extreme, an average of 1876 kilometres are travelled by train each year by every person who lives in Japan.

“lifeline to the nation” Indian Railways, 2006

Territory size shows the proportion of all train passenger kilometres travelled in the world that occur there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page