Prompted by a new display at the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester, Jonathan Welch takes a brief look back at the history and development of ticketing and payment technology over the last 200 years.
Yes, the headline is a terrible pun. I make no apologies.
But actually, what is a ‘ticket’ today? Regular readers and subscribers will remember that a few issues ago I took a peek at some of the collection of publicity materials housed at the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester. Given its vast archive, I only scratched the surface of what’s hidden securely in the museum’s vaults and back rooms.
On the same visit, the museum’s Paul WIlliams also showed me its latest new display, featuring a collection of ticketing equipment collected and bequeathed to the museum along with sufficient funding to create the display by enthusiast and collector Bob Wingrove. Housed in a long line of tall glass cabinets, the collection is testament to Bob’s enthusiasm and passion for the topic.
Evolution or revolution?
Since the turn of the millennium, we’ve seen how smart ticketing using payment cards, apps and smartcards has changed the face of bus travel, offering what we’re told are simple, easier to use and convenient integrated ticketing options. The word revolutionary is one that an advertiser might use to describe the change. You might be forgiven for thinking that until now, ticketing has remained unchanged for decades, if not hundreds of years.
So it might come as a surprise to wander along the chronologically laid out display cabinets in one of the Museum’s two display halls and see just how far we’d come, and to realise that for all the spin, there were lots of ‘smart’ ticketing innovations in the past too.
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“We only have a small proportion of the collection on display,” Paul explained. “It’s really interesting to see the story of how we got where we are today. Back in the 1830s and 1840s, the total equipment carried by conductors was a bag.
“Operators eventually started to realise that they were just scraping by, and as a result the first fare collection equipment was designed to stop crew fraud, not passenger irregularities. Another big driver was correctly apportioning the revenue for joint services, rather than understanding passenger flows as a modern operator might want to. In some cases, that was done down to the nearest 64th of a mile, or 30 yards. It wasn’t until much later that people realised that ticketing could help give a better understanding of where buses were needed and how many people were travelling.”
Long history
Manchester’s first bus service ran 200 years ago in 1824, an anniversary that the museum is celebrating with a series of events this year. As we walked along the display, which begins with a mannequin dressed in a 1900 conductor’s uniform, Paul pointed out some of the interesting developments. One of the first that stood out was the use of punches; it’s easy to forget that they weren’t just a means of marking a ticket as used, but also a way to analyse them by counting the tiny, different coloured chads collected within. “Some look like implements of torture,” Paul pointed out, though the real torture might have been in the counting!
Taking fares wasn’t just a Manchester necessity, of course, and down in the growing metropolis of London when fellow bus pioneer George Shillibeer began his first bus service in 1829, he also employed conductors, who collected fares but did not issue tickets. Building on the established stagecoach practice of the era, fares collected were just recorded on the waybill.
As the London Transport Museum explains, the conductor completed the waybill and paid his and the driver’s wages, and some other running costs, out of the fares collected before handing over the rest of the money to the bus owner; the potential shortcomings in an urban situation with large numbers of small payments, not to mention the risk of unscrupulous conductors. Horse tram companies used systems in which they received all the fares and then paid the staff; they also issued passengers with serially-numbered tickets as a way of keeping track of the money taken by conductors.
Systems involving various kinds of serially-numbered, coloured tickets for each fare value became commonplace, with fare stages printed on the tickets, which were punched with a hole in the appropriate stage by the conductor.
The ‘Bell Punch’ system became common, and also included a bell which rang when the sale was registered, and a sealed record of all sales, to help minimise opportunities for fraud. It remained, however, rather labour intensive, but at least allowed discrepancies to be investigated by counting the chads – a job, as Paul pointed out, almost always done by women. Statistics about service usage and financial results were compiled manually.
Equipment from this era can be seen in the first of the Manchester museum’s display cases, which covers the early period from 1824 to 1900. Each item is numbered and identified, to help viewers understand their significance.
As the museum’s display explains, the punch system was slow for conductors. There were early attempts to mechanise ticketing, dating back over 100 years, though with limited success because the wide range of fare values possible, especially in a large city like London.
Mechanical modernisation
Nationwide, the inter-war years saw some development of mechanical machines, Paul explained, which printed onto blank paper, eliminating the need for vast stocks of tickets to be ordered and held by operators, and also adding the advantage that the blank rolls had no value if stolen. In the early 1930s, London introduced 600 ‘TIM’ mechanical ticket machines that printed tickets on blank paper rolls, though little more progress was made for over a decade until Superintendent of its Effra Road Ticket Printing Works George Gibson produced a prototype ticket machine that was initially patented by himself and London Transport.
After some trialling and refinement, accompanied by a simplification of fares, Gibson ticket machines were introduced in London between 1952 and 1958. Bell Punch-style tickets continued to be used when the new machines failed, and new ‘Setright’ machines were used on Green Line coaches where a bigger range of fares was required. It wasn’t until 1993 that London rid itself of its remaining ‘Gibson’ machines, replaced by a specially-developed portable electronic machine. In London, and even more so elsewhere across the country, the era of ‘one-man operation’ (OMO) was another driver for change, whilst towards the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s, the rise of electronic ticketing systems also allowed forms of payment beyond cash to start to take hold.
Another innovation which came along with OMO buses, and one which didn’t extend to become widespread, was the use of turnstiles whereby passengers placed coins into the turnstile to be allowed through as they boarded.
Data-driven
For those in the back office, there was clear progress, explained Paul, from a position of simply taking money, through to one where operators knew where and when the money had been taken. There has been a continual but gradual shift from tickets as a means to prevent fraud by servants of the company, to use the vernacular, to a position where they are a source of data as well as help to prevent passenger dishonesty.
Conventional, paper-based methods of off-bus ticketing should also not be forgotten, but with the exception of London it’s not something that has become popular in itself across the UK. Arguably, though, many of the modern forms of payment, such as pre-paid mobile ticket bundles, fall into the ‘off-bus’ category without really being viewed as such; rather, they tend to be seen as new, technology-based convenience solutions rather than a way of speeding up a bus by selling tickets before a passenger boards.
Until the 1960s and ‘70s, ticket machines remained largely mechanical, though electricity started to be used as a means to speed them up, Paul explained, such as by using an electric motor rather than a hand-wound handle. The advent of reliable and affordable miniaturised electronics in the early 1980s meant that electronic ticket machines became a practical proposition, also driven by the needs of the newly deregulated industry to better understand its networks and harvest vital commercial data on passenger flows.
It’s only in the last decade or so that the appearance of the ticket machine has significantly changed again, with the appearance of large LED screens and later the introduction of touchscreens on move-able arms by Ticketer, bringing a whole different dimension to the driver interaction experience. The displays at the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester reflect this, with modern electronic examples also on display. The contrast between those 1980s and 1990s machines and the Wayfarer, later Almex, ticket machines (accompanied by exact fare vaults and magnetic stripe ‘Farecards’) that I’ve used during my own career was already large, and is a world away from the pre-printed coloured tickets of the industry’s forefathers.
Modern perspective
Bringing the story up to date, I caught up with Minesh Vandra from well-known industry supplier Transmach. “The humble ticket machine that only dispensed paper tickets is fast becoming obsolete due to developments in contactless ticketing technology, particularly since the pandemic,” he lamented. “Contactless has quickly become the norm, as consumers expect to pay with some form of contactless payment, rather than cash. The result is a step-change in convenience for passengers, who no longer need to worry about having the right change, for drivers who no longer need to handle as much cash, and for operators who no longer need to process large amounts of it.”
Companies such as Transmach have been at the forefront of this smart ticketing evolution. Transmach works with hundreds of small and medium-sized operators and public authorities to streamline not just the purchase and validation of tickets but the whole administrative process, including BODS compliance and security safeguarding protocols for EMV payments, giving it a wide-reaching insight into the demands of modern operators, passengers and end users.
Reflecting broader industry trends, the company is continuing to make advances in open and closed loop software for contactless multi modal ticketing, in particular the growing use of ‘tap-on, tap-off’ with personal credit and debit cards, as well as working with transport app providers to deliver payment-linked QR codes on smartphones, which it says are rapidly rising in popularity.
Addressing the age-old issue of fraud, though in modern times committed by passengers rather than drivers or conductors, TransMach is one of a number of partners developing a cross-industry ‘deny list’ and real-time barcode checking as means to protect revenue and minimise the risk of contactless ticket fraud.
Sustainability
Minesh rasied another good point regarding modern ticketing options; that of sustainability. As he pointed out, a reduction in physical operator smartcards in favour of bank cards and smartphone wallets means less plastic waste, as well as enhanced convenience and flexibility for user and operator alike, whilst the reduction in cash fares has led to a corresponding drop in the amount of paper tickets issued.
Highlighting the ever-increasing importance of being able to offer a whole range of payment types to passengers as part of efforts to reduce barriers to travel, Minesh added: “We support all forms of EMV contactless payment, as that helps operators to choose the right technology for them. It’s important for us to provide choice, plus the ability for ‘pain free’ switching to our service. Operators are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of data and how they can use it to analyse trends and patterns, and amend their networks to improve efficiency based on informed decisions.”
It won’t be long before the current generation of ticket machines end up in museums, and it’s not hard to envision that it won’t be much further down the line that there’s little to no physical fare collection equipment needed on board. And if you’re one of the companies ditching your old equipment in favour of something shiny and new, please get in touch with the museum, or one in your local area, to see if they might be interested in preserving a piece of modern history for future generations.
