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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 4 (July 1, 1936)

History of the Railway Ticket

History of the Railway Ticket.

The average railway ticket is really a most unpretentious affair. Behind the grille of every railway booking-office, however, lies romance in abundance, and the story of the birth and evolution of the railway ticket is fascinating indeed. The modern railway ticket may be traced right back to the paper tickets issued to travellers in the old stage coach days. On these slips, or tickets, the booking-clerk had to enter by hand a host of details, such as the passenger's name; the coach in which accommodation was desired; whether inside or outside seats were preferred; and so on. One copy of the ticket was handed the passenger; the guard kept another; and a third was retained in the booking-office. The pioneer railways, in the main, followed out this complicated system. In 1832, however, the Leicester & Swannington Railway introduced, in place of paper tickets, brass octagonal checks engraved with the name of the company, destination station, and a serial number. The
The “Flying Cologner,” German National Railways.

The “Flying Cologner,” German National Railways.

checks were collected by the guard on completion of the journey, and conveyed back to issuing point for further use.

The railway ticket as we know it to-day first appeared about 1836. It was the invention of Thomas Edmondson, stationmaster at Milton (now Brampton) on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway. Edmondson not only produced the first cardboard railway ticket, but it was also to his inventive genius we owe the ticket issuing and dating machine. To-day, Edmondson-type ticket issuers are employed on railways the world over, and the firm which Thomas Edmondson founded in Manchester for the construction of the early ticket presses now supplies ticket printing, dating and issuing machines of the most modern type to railways everywhere. Incidentally, the modern electrically-driven printing machine turns out 10,000 perfectly printed railway tickets per hour, as compared with the 1,000 tickets per hour of the old hand-operated presses.