Answer the question from the given passage. Your answer should be directly extracted from the passage, and it should be a single entity, name, or number, not a sentence.
Q: Passage: The city is served by the Tyne and Wear Metro, a system of suburban and underground railways covering much of Tyne and Wear. It was opened in five phases between 1980 and 1984, and was Britain's first urban light rail transit system; two extensions were opened in 1991 and 2002. It was developed from a combination of existing and newly built tracks and stations, with deep-level tunnels constructed through Newcastle city centre. A bridge was built across the Tyne, between Newcastle and Gateshead, and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1981. The network is operated by DB Regio on behalf of Nexus and carries over 37 million passengers a year, extending as far as Newcastle Airport, Tynemouth, South Shields and South Hylton in Sunderland. In 2004, the company Marconi designed and constructed the mobile radio system to the underground Metro system. The Metro system was the first in the UK to have mobile phone antennae installed in the tunnels. Question: How many passengers a year does the rail network in Newcastle carry?
A:
over 37 million