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Station usage statistics pre-1997?

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Senex

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I'm not sure if this is the right place for this query — if not, could Admin move it to the proper location, please?

The figures for passenger usage of the various stations from 1997 onwards are readily available on line. But does anyone know if any similar figures for earlier years are to be found, or were the usage figures for individual stations in the British Rail(ways) era simply never made available? If they weren't accessible to the public, do they exist and are they to be found in any of the railway records now at Kew?
 
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LUSOwner

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I contacted the ORR on this matter and they said they only held data on these years - whether BR had this data I am none the wiser...

Unfortunately I don't have the email any more...
 

Andrew1395

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I maybe wrong, but I think CAPRI data, used to analyse revenue, was used to compile data of usage at a station level to inform privatisation. So that data would have been made available to OPRAF/ORR. Whether BR business sectors collated data at a station level I am unsure. BRPB Station Trading did use Station usage figures. How they collated them, I don't know.

It could be the BR did routinely compile annualised Station usage figures, as opposed to annualised passenger numbers. I am not sure where all BR data is vested at. It maybe that business intelligence data is available (for example for academic research). Perhaps an approach to the National Archive (when the world settles back down)?
 
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Dr Hoo

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I'm not sure if this is the right place for this query — if not, could Admin move it to the proper location, please?

The figures for passenger usage of the various stations from 1997 onwards are readily available on line. But does anyone know if any similar figures for earlier years are to be found, or were the usage figures for individual stations in the British Rail(ways) era simply never made available? If they weren't accessible to the public, do they exist and are they to be found in any of the railway records now at Kew?
As a BR Service Group Manager in sector days (early 1990s) I would often have loved to have known how many passengers were using 'my' stations but data was very sketchy.
It was possible to interrogate CAPRI with 'flow enquiries' which would usually list the top 100 flows. For most smaller stations these would capture to great majority of journeys. Not so useful for big city centre stations though.
These enquiries, of a mainframe system, running on a batch processing basis overnight, were complicated to set up and (at least informally) 'rationed' on a "why do you need to know?" basis by the Business Services 'priesthood'.
For some stations the use of passenger transport executive 'zonal' and multi-modal tickets meant that a very large slice of journeys were not recorded on a point-to-point basis. In tourist areas - including much of Scotland - extensive use of rover and InterRail passes was an issue too.
Different management and planning methods were used. Actually sending some agency staff out for a survey/passenger count was often quite helpful because it could also provide a picture of factors like overcrowding, adequacy of station facilities, spread of usage throughout the day, demographics, means of getting to the station and so forth. More helpful than some (incomplete and arbitrary) raw numbers spat out from a mainframe.
So the simple answer is that 'they didn't exist' before 1997, certainly not in any standardised, systematic, national form.
 

Senex

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Thank you very much for that — it makes things very much clearer! I do like the notion of the high priests wanting to keep control on knowledge. Was it not ever thus?
 

LNW-GW Joint

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In the 1960s at least, I was told that all collected ticket stubs were sent to Derby for analysis (this was in LM territory).
It was one of the reasons for the tiresome BR practice of collecting all tickets at a station exit, usually funnelling hoards of people past a single collector at a terminus.
It would probably have been done at the all-powerful Regional level too, and not at a national level.
This probably changed in the sector period, with gradual automation of ticket issue, and computerisation at HQ.

I remember the Beeching traffic maps (1963) came as a considerable surprise, in terms of how low/high certain routes were (very much favouring London commuting).
But the closure analysis, for the few examples shown, seemed to be more about station receipts and line costs than numbers of passengers and the journeys they made.
 

StephenHunter

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Yes, Beeching chose to ignore that many of the places that lost their service, such as Minehead or Maldon, got most of their traffic in the summer months; BR would often run extra trains on summer Saturdays to cope with the demand.
 

WesternLancer

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I'm not sure if this is the right place for this query — if not, could Admin move it to the proper location, please?

The figures for passenger usage of the various stations from 1997 onwards are readily available on line. But does anyone know if any similar figures for earlier years are to be found, or were the usage figures for individual stations in the British Rail(ways) era simply never made available? If they weren't accessible to the public, do they exist and are they to be found in any of the railway records now at Kew?
You probably need to bear in mind other comments above as to what actualy existed, but if it did you probably need National Record Office / National Archives at Kew. In my work area (not transport) all sorts of data was collected for govt stats which were then published by HMSO in annual digests - we had a whole room of them relevant to our work in our office dating back to circa 1945 (this was in about 2005) - but online publication of such stuff rarely is available in ministry tables pre 1997. Think this is because Blair govt decided to digitise all govt data in the 2000s but only backdated it for a few years to give context. I was trying to answer a question last week that required a statistic for 1952 financial year. I know it exists but not on line and not important enough to go to Kew - it would have been in that room of books of data but they got cleared out circa 10 years ago: 'why would we ever want all those old books of information'....
 
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