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.