Edmonson railway ticket
The Edmondson railway ticket was a system for recording the payment of railway fares and accounting for the revenue raised, introduced in the 1840s. It is named after its inventor, Thomas Edmondson, a trained cabinet maker, who became a station master on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway in England. He introduced his system on the Manchester and Leeds Railway. Previously, railway companies had used handwritten tickets, as was the practice for stagecoaches, but it was laborious for a ticket clerk to write out a ticket for each passenger and long queues were common at busy stations. A faster means of issuing pre-printed tickets was needed. There was also a need to provide accountability by serial-numbering each ticket to prevent unscrupulous clerks from pocketing the fares, since they had to reconcile the takings against the serial numbers of the unsold tickets at the end of each day.
The Edmondson system came into general use with the creation of the Railway Clearing House in 1842, becoming the essential standard feature.
The tickets were printed on card cut to 1 7⁄32 by 2 1⁄4 inches (31.0 by 57.2 mm), with a nominal thickness of 1⁄32 inch (0.79 mm). The whole system, from printing to bulk storage to ticket racks, dating and issue, was based on these measurements. Although there is some small variation nowadays (metricated to 30 x 57 x 0.75 mm for example), it is still a vital component of the system.
The tickets in each series were individually numbered. When a ticket was issued, it was date-stamped by a custom-made machine. The tickets to different destinations and of different types were stored in a lockable cupboard where the lowest remaining number of each issue was visible. Different colours and patterns helped distinguish the different types of tickets.
British Rail's centralised paper and printing centre at Crewe had a number of pre-1900 Waterlow printing presses which met its annual demand for 320 million tickets. The last press was switched off in 1988 and the use of Edmondson tickets by British Rail completely ceased in February 1990 after being replaced by the standard APTIS orange card tickets.
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