The Edmondson Ticket

Douglas A Colquhoun

It is impossible to legally travel on a train without either a ticket, for which one has had to pay a specified amount, or some form of pass which has been issued by the controlling authority. Yet scant attention has been paid to this most important aspect of railway operation in Australia.

Of particular interest is the Edmondson ticket; that small 2¼" x 1 3/16" (57mm x 30mm) coloured card that, until recent times, was in almost universal use throughout the world.

Thomas Edmondson was born in Lancaster, in the UK on 30th June 1792. As a boy he began his apprenticeship with a local woodworker, but completed it with a furniture maker and became a journeyman cabinetmaker. He went into a partnership with some friends, but the business failed and he was forced to look for employment elsewhere. For a while he became involved in the tea and grocery business, but was never happy in this field.

In 1836, at the age of 44, he applied for and was successful in obtaining a position as Stationmaster at Scotsby on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, but later he moved to Milton where he formed the idea of a new type of passenger ticket. At this time the railways of Britain used a wide assortment of fare collect- ion methods. For the most part tickets were torn from a book (similar to the old S.A.R. Excess Fare tickets), but some used metal tokens. The Stockton & Darlington used large (105mm x 70mm) un-numbered paper tickets, on which the Stationmaster wrote the number at the time of sale. This system was obvious-ly open to fraudulent practices.

While at Milton Thomas Edmondson built a small printing frame in which he produced card tickets measuring 1½" x 1 1/8" (39mm x 29mm) showing the issueing station and destination, the number (still written) and the value. His tickets were numbered from 0 to 9999, so that the number of the next ticket to be sold represented the number of tickets sold to that point. This system survived until Edmondson tickets were phased out in favour of electron- ic and other types 150 years later.