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The Edmondson railway ticket was a system for recording the payment of railway fares and accounting for the revenue raised, introduced in the 1840s.〔Farr, M (1997). "Edmondson, Thomas". In: Simmonds and Biddle (1997), Page 141〕 It is named after its inventor, Thomas Edmondson, a trained cabinet maker, who became a station master on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway in England.〔 He introduced his system on the Manchester and Leeds Railway.〔 Previously, railway companies had used handwritten tickets, as was the practice for stagecoaches, but it was laborious for a ticket clerk to write out a ticket for each passenger and long queues were common at busy stations. A faster means of issuing pre-printed tickets was needed. There was also a need to provide accountability by serial-numbering each ticket to prevent unscrupulous clerks from pocketing the fares, since they had to reconcile the takings against the serial numbers of the unsold tickets at the end of each day. The Edmondson system came into general use with the creation of the Railway Clearing House in 1842, becoming ''the essential standard feature.'' ==Edmondson tickets in the United Kingdom== The tickets were printed on card cut to , with a nominal thickness of . The whole system, from printing to bulk storage to ticket racks, dating and issue, was based on these measurements. Although there is some small variation nowadays (metricated to 30 x 57 x 0.75 mm for example), it is still a vital component of the system. The tickets in each series were individually numbered. When a ticket was issued, it was date-stamped by a custom-made machine. The tickets to different destinations and of different types were stored in a lockable cupboard where the lowest remaining number of each issue was visible. Different colours and patterns helped distinguish the different types of tickets. British Rail's centralised paper and printing centre at Crewe had a number of pre-1900 Waterlow printing presses which met its annual demand for 320 million tickets.〔"BR Ends Edmondson". In: Railway Magazine, Vol. 134, March 1988, Page 148.〕 The last press was switched off in 1988〔 and the use of Edmondson tickets by British Rail completely ceased in February 1990 after being replaced by the standard APTIS orange card tickets.〔 Vertical-format Edmondson card-size tickets were the final manifestation of the Edmondson in the UK. The NCR21 system was used at Southern Region station booking offices from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, until supplanted by the early generation of computerised systems including INTIS and APTIS. Vertical-format Edmonsons were validated in NCR21 cash registers—this is the machine printed date/fare/machine number on the ticket front. Some NCR24 machines were later bought from Dutch Railways for use on the Southern and these were distinguishable from NCR21 because the machine data—in a slightly different format—appeared upside down on tickets. To interest collectors, even the smaller stations would carry pre-printed ticket stock for single and return, adult and child journeys to numerous local stations and London, with "blank" stock also available for use for journeys for which no printed stock was available. Use of Edmondson tickets were British Rail declined during the 1980s as computerised systems superseded them. After APTIS was launched in 1986, NCR21-equipped stations were converted to the new technology, concluding in June 1989 with the removal of Edmondson tickets from Emerson Park railway station.〔 The Edmondson system is still in use on many heritage railways in the UK. For example, the Severn Valley railway, the West Somerset Railway, the Bluebell Railway, the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and the Swanage Railway print Edmondson tickets for their own use as well as for a number of other heritage lines. In Sussex the Bluebell Railway has a number of Edmondson printing machines that are to be placed on display in a specially-built museum at the front of Sheffield Park station. There are several small companies that still produce Edmondson tickets on request. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Edmondson railway ticket」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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