before and after
APTIS
Part of
Joyce's World of Transport Eclectica
This page is mainly about the variety of railway tickets used by British Rail in the years before APTIS, PORTIS, SPORTIS, TRIBUTE and other standard types of machine-validated blanks were introduced. I have recently introduced an extra section about APTIS tickets.
The picture above shows a traditional Edmondson card ticket. These tickets go back to the very early days of railways and were invented by Thomas Edmondson of Lancaster. See the links list below for their full story. The example above is a child's privilege return ticket from North Berwick to Edinburgh and back. It would be issued to someone with an identity card showing that they were entitled to such a ticket as the son or daughter of active or retired railway staff. The privilege rate was (and is) one quarter of the normal full fare.
They remained in use at all but the busiest stations until APTIS, PORTIS and their derivatives were brought into widespread use in the late 1980s. Nowadays, Edmondson cards can only be found on preserved lines in Britain, and on some overseas railways. Fortunately, one of the specialised printing presses from Crewe Printing Works has been preserved on the West Somerset Railway where it still churns out tickets for the WSR, other lines and indeed, anyone who wants an unusual design of ticket or even party invitation.
The Edmondson card ticket was pre-printed, needing only to be validated by a date stamp. They were kept in elaborate ticket racks, with a kind of chute for each individual ticket type. Each ticket would be issued in sequence, and woe betide any clerk who issued them out of sequence, because that made accountancy very difficult! It was also an obvious method of fraud which meant that frequent and time consuming checks had to be made by station masters and other supervisory staff.
This ticket bears two interesting marks. Firstly, the cancellation marks along the bottom showing that the ticket has been used. They have actually been clipped by a very old set of North British Railway nippers - that particular mark was no longer officially in use. Secondly, the slightly wavy line in blue ink on the right hand side shows that this ticket was the first to be issued on that particular day or shift. Every ticket had to be accounted for, and a mark like that was used by booking clerks to show that they had already checked all the tickets of that particular type.
Reckoning up at the end of a shift could be a slow and tedious job, especially if tickets had been issued to a wide range of destinations. The way it was done was to check the number of the next ticket in the ticket rack. If the "opening" number when the shift started was 3248, as with the ticket in the picture, and the "closing" number at the end of the shift was 3268, then clearly 20 tickets had been issued. And if the price of one ticket was, say, 60p, then there ought to be (20 x 60p) = £12 in the till. (Sometimes there wasn't, because the wrong change had been given at some point in the shift. In these cases, the clerk was supposed to enter the difference in the traffic book. Clerks in the quieter country stations would raid the "Up Fund" or local equivalent, usually a jam jar with a few odd coins that had been left over the last time the books didn't balance.)
Remember - the pictures aren't linked back to this page so you'll also need to use whatever passes for a BACK feature in your browser if you want to return here.
Key to the "letter" endorsements against each ticket specimen:
A - Class The modern systems of machine printed blanks were introduced as follows: APTIS tickets
The All Purpose Ticket Issuing System (subsequently renamed the Accountancy and Passenger Ticketing Issuing System) became the standard system on British Rail during the late 1980s.
And Wikipedia has a page that explains today's codes on APTIS tickets and their successors.
Links to other sites of interest:
This page was last updated in February 2007. Comments on this site, or notice of any broken links, are always welcome: let me know.
Page 3 Edmondson card tickets, traditional style
Page 4 Edmondson card tickets, modern (1970s) style
Page 6 NCR51 tickets (large, machine validated)
Page 7 NCR21 tickets (small, machine validated); Ultimatic; Rapidprinter; Flexiprinter; Multiprinter
Page 8 Handiprinter; Omniprinter
Page 9 Almex
Page 10 Paper ticket (single)
Page 11 Paper ticket (return)
Page 12 Paper ticket (Golden Rail)
Page 13 Continental coupon and cover
B - Type
C - Date
D - Station from
E - Destination station
F - Route
G - Serial number
H - Fare
I - Number of passengers
J - Station of issue (name or code)
K - Destination code
N - nip or mark here
n - Second and subsequent nips or marks
System Date First station SSTIS 13/02/80 Argyle Street INTIS 02/06/81 Manchester Piccadilly Prototype APTIS 11/11/82 Portsmouth & Southsea APTIS 27/10/86 Didcot Parkway Prototype PORTIS 03/05/82 Bristol area PORTIS 07/07/86 Watford-St Albans line (Before conversion to SPORTIS)
Supplementary page 1 Specimen APTIS tickets - single ticket and period season ticket
Supplementary page 2 Specimen ATPIS tickets - return ticket (outward and return portions)
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