Early 20th Century Train Tickets

GYurick

New Member
My church's Christmas Production has a railroad theme. We need to know what train tickets would have looked like around 1905. Can anyone help? I don't have a clue where to go to get such info.
 

babydot94513

Member in training
Don't know off-hand but if you are looking for general information rather than region specific, you may want to try Bay Area Rail History over on Yahoopsie.
 

60103

Pooh Bah
I think tickets stayed pretty much the same up until they adopted the Visa slip type.
The commonest were about credit card sized or a bit less, made of cardboard. The front side would have the name of the railroad, the start and end points. There would also be an authentication mark -- stamp or signature, a date - isuue or expiry, a class -first, coach, pullman...
The backside would have the fine print. A station would usually have a stock of preprinted tickets for major stations .e.g. in Pennsylvania they would have Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Washington, New York and Chicago and some other big cities online, plus any neighbouring towns. There would also be a pile labelled Cobblers Knob to _____ and the blank filled in by hand or rubber stamp.
Some tickets would be in sections -- out and back perforated (plus a third section).
Major trips involving many railroads would have a very long ticket with a section for each railroad, steamboat, stagecoach company involved. They used to be folded up and fell open like a grandmother's wallet of baby photos.
Most tickets were colour coded -- I remember yellow as popular, but see Mark Twain's essay "Punch, Brothers, Punch".
Some lines, esp. streetcars, would have little illustrations of passengers and the conductor would punch the appropriate picture.
Oh, yes. Conductors' punches: like a one hole punch, the scissors action type, making holes about 1/8" to 3/16" -- all different shapes so that they could be traced .
Any other details you need?
 

Vic

Active Member
The Robber Barron to the Rescue!!!!:D :D

Here's some pics of Central of Ga. tickets from my collection. Tickets were pretty much standard from railroad to railroad.

Hope this helps.:)
 

Attachments

  • upload.jpg
    upload.jpg
    48.8 KB · Views: 76

Vic

Active Member
And a "sho nuff" conductor's cash ticket from 1905!:D
 

Attachments

  • cashtic.jpg.jpg
    cashtic.jpg.jpg
    38.8 KB · Views: 70

GYurick

New Member
Thanks so much to all who responded. I never expected actual pictures of tickets, but you could not have been more helpful. I have printed out those pictures and we are reproducing them as I type. Again, a huge THANK YOU to you guys.

Happy Thanksgiving,
GYurick
 

Vic

Active Member
If you need larger individual images of the tickets let me know as I have them also but will have to send them to you by e-mail as the images are too large to post here. I had to shrink them to post here.
 
Top