Train, Tram and Bus, Melbourne Public Transport Tickets – Paper
Some of you may know that for about two years in the 1990s I worked for the Public Transport Corporation in Melbourne. It was the recession, jobs were scarce and jobs for Science Graduates were non-existent. I started as a tram conductor at Glen Huntley Depot and then moved into being a Customer Service Employee with the trains, stationed at Flinders St Station. I left in 1998 to go and be a Business Analyst in the financial services industry (Technology in financial services has been my shtick ever since).
It’s a family thing in multiple directions to work for public transport – dad worked for many years as first a tram engineer, and ended up as Tram Fleet Manager out at Preston Depot before they shifted the tram engineering works to other places. He went in the round of redundancies in the 90s when they merged Tram and Bus with the Rail. Mum worked for a time in a typing pool in the 60s at Flinders St station. My grandfather worked on the electrics at various stations (he also worked in the electrical engineering corps during WWII, in the Pacific), and I hear tell one of my other great-greats was part of the group who put the railings in at Flinders St.
So I’m a bit of a train/tram/public transport infrastructure geek. Not huge compared to some, but it’s there.
I grew up surrounded by tram stuff and I recently have managed to inherit a bunch of really cool artifacts. Because Boomers are getting rid of their stuff. Well I’m taking it.
Before Myki (the current ticketing system), and before the Metcard (previous ticketing system) we had a paper-based system. You’d buy a ticket that would be stamped or punched with the day/date/time and you’d use that. They were throw away, ephemeral, other than a yearly.
I used to both sell (on the trams) and inspect (on the trains) these tickets. You’d clip the date and the month and the year was printed on the ticket. It was a one-day ticket. I actually think by my day they stopped printing the year, I may be wrong. Which meant if you really wanted you could use a last year’s ticket if you happened to keep it.
HOW COOL ARE THESE DOES THIS TRIGGER YOUR MEMORIES!
We used to have zones. Zone one was all trams (barring two lines that turned into zone two), basically CBD out to a certain point. Two was the ring around one (I’ve always lived in either zone one or around the rim of one) and three were the poor folk who lived in Ringwood, Dandenong, and Frankston.
So if you were traveling through various zones you’d have to buy all zones. Current zoning is quite different though it’s based on this. Zone three is gone now.
Concession cards – with the white stripe, were cheaper tickets. You needed to have a concession card that enabled you to have a concession fare (student card or healthcare card). I booked a lot of people for using concession tickets without a card.
A sixty plus got you all day travel in any zone if you were over 60. Really good deal.
My main regret is I don’t have a complete set of dailys. But what I do have are unused/un-punched cards, making them rarer. This would have been because the person I got them from worked in the system and had access to unsold tickets.
