St Pancras International has been named the best railway station in Europe.

The north London hub - and home of the Eurostar - beat off stiff competition in the inaugural 2020 European Railway Station Index from some of the Continent’s most renowned terminals, including Berlin Central, Gare du Nord in Paris and Moscow Kazansky.

Zurich Central Station took second spot while Leipzig Central Station completed the podium; four more German entries made the top 10 (Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt), while the UK had no other inclusion. Its next highest station was Birmingham New Street in 12th.

“[St Pancras’] low number of strike days, high passenger convenience, and international connectivity helped take it to first place,” read the European Railway Station Index. “The fact that it also hosts the longest champagne bar in Europe did not influence this ranking.”

The full ranking of 50 stations in Europe awarded each a score based on a number of considerations, including annual passengers, destinations, accessibility, cleanliness and array of shops and restaurants.

St Pancras, which first opened in 1868 but was reborn with the Eurostar in 2007, scored highly in many of the categories, with 43 domestic destinations, 10 international, 36 shops and 23 restaurants; 35.6 million passengers use the station every year.

The Gare du Nord, into which Eurostar guests arrive in Paris, performed poorly, ranking 26th, despite welcoming more passengers a year than any other station in Europe (206.7m, nearly six times as many as St Pancras). Brussels Midi, another Eurostar destination, did not make the top 50, while Amsterdam Central, to which passengers can now travel direct to and from on Eurostar, took 24th spot.

Zurich Central Station, ranked second Credit: istock

The Consumer Choice Center, which carried out the analysis, and also runs an annual ranking of Europe’s airports, said it was motivated to launch the index due to the rise in importance of rail travel in Europe in recent years.

“Policy makers and consumers have oriented toward train travel as a means of reducing carbon emissions,” it said. “While we at the Consumer Choice Center stand for choice and technology neutrality, we want to use the rise of interest in long distance train travel as an opportunity to show which railway stations in Europe are the most convenient for travelers.”

It said it set out to find Europe’s most passenger-friendly railway stations.

In Telegraph Travel’s own ranking of London’s train stations earlier this year, St Pancras also came out on top.

Greg Dickinson explained: “One in six of St Pancras’s 50 million annual visitors come to experience it rather than travel from it (a similar accolade can’t be claimed by Euston...) and they are right to do so. This is a destination station that represents the nostalgic glamour of rail travel, described by Simon Jenkins in his book of Britain’s 100 Best Railway stations as the nation’s overall ‘best’ one.

“St Pancras is generally considered to be the pinnacle of the Victorian Gothic Revival style, with its red-brick facade the most handsome of any station in the UK (and, arguably, the world). Its not-particularly-modest architect George Gilbert Scott declared it not merely the finest building in London, but ‘possibly too good for its purpose'. Today the interior is a meeting of the old and the new, its sky-blue ironwork and glazing train shed have been brought to life as part of its early 21st-century renovation.

“This is a station of class. It has a champagne bar, haute cuisine in Marcus Wareing’s The Gilbert Scott, and the chic Booking Office bar. It even has its own Hamleys toy shop and a John Lewis.”

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