Something that was still around when I was working in Public Transport Corporation was the rail plus two and a weekend saver. Rail plus two meant you could get on at any of the CBD stations and travel two out – ie, to South Yarra, or North Melbourne, and it was a cheaper ticket, acknowledging the super short trip.
Any time the ticket inspectors were at a station, people would buy them to get through barriers and happily sail off to their end of line destinations. I booked someone in Ringwood for a rail plus two when they should have had a zone 1, 2 and 3.
The weekend ticket allowed a family to travel for a bit of a discount. They still do this for off peak in both metropolitan and country trains….look it up! But it used to be a paper ticket. When i was a connie I had a book of those tickets, I never sold one. No one sold one that I know of.
I don’t remember the short trip tickets being used. Well, if you see the price they are 6d etc, so pre decimal, 1966. I have no idea how these were used, probably you purchased the stops you wanted and it was punched.
Also in my day we had yearly and student yearly cards both were a photo id ticket that was laminated.. You could go anywhere in zone one, but as above you can see that it used to be a lot more convoluted than that!
When Melbourne Metropolitan Tram and Bus merged in with the railways and it all became ‘The Met’ , the ticketing was streamlined a lot more, as can be seen on these ticket books. The current iteration on tickets and lines is based on that reform, even if prices have gone up and zones have shifted. (I don’t think the tickets are too expensive, btw, quite the contrary!)
Check out the Employees’s pass! I used to have a travel card to travel anywhere on v-line or the met back in 96. The perks of working for PT meant when our shift ended, we could jump on the Warrigal passenger train at Flinders and disembark at Caulfield or Dandenong, ie, we were allowed to behave as though the nice comfy vline trains were suburban trains. I still laugh thinking of the poor guy who fell asleep, missed Dandenong, and ended up in Warrigul.
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