The National Rail Travel Survey (NRTS) is a survey of passenger trips on the National Rail system. It was designed to fill a gap in knowledge about who uses the rail network, where, when and for what purposes.

All stations in Great Britain were surveyed on weekdays during school term-times during the period 2000-2005. Data was collected from passengers by self-completion questionnaire, and passenger counts are carried out at the same time to give details of the volume of people using each station. This enabled the survey responses to be weighted up to represent all rail passengers. About 430,000 questionnaires were collected in total. The return rate of questionnaires was typically 20% to 30% of questionnaires distributed to passengers.

The data collected was subject to extensive cleaning and analysis to allow for double counting the balancing of flows between stations. The final files of processed survey records were made available to Transport Scotland for use in the development of TMfS:07.

The following information is available:

The NRTS origin-destination data was processed and demand matrices prepared suitable for incorporation in the national model.