Title: Mr Gibson’s Ticket Machine
Author: Anthony Cross
Publisher: Capital Transport Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-85414-465-2
Specification: 200mm x 210mm, 112pp, softback
Price: £16.95
The story of how London Transport mechanised bus ticketing in the 1950s has some parallels with Transport for London’s reluctance to replace conventional destination blinds with electronic displays.
In both cases, the move could have been made much earlier, but the older technology worked and none of the potential replacements met its exacting requirements. Only now are digital destination displays on the market with anything like the clarity of conventional blinds.
Likewise ticket machines. London Transport had around 600 TIM (Ticket Issuing Machines) sets in use at the end of World War Two, inherited from operators taken over at its formation in 1933, but most of its bus, trolleybus and tram conductors still used the Bell Punch system that required them to carry a rack of adult, child and workmen’s tickets specially printed for each route, in different colours for each fare, which they then had to punch in the appropriate place as they were issued.
It dispensed over 3.7billion of these tickets in 1947 alone, 2.25billion of…
