At Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum; Bud Tibbie on the left and Joe Kingsbury on the right.

BTW, I agree that tickets should be punched. On the rare occasions when I car host, I always tear off the conductors ticket stub and punch the souvenir ticket before returning them to the passengers. Nearly every time, the person receiving the punched ticket checks out what I have done and man, woman or child, I get a smile when they realize what I have done.

Les

And at the Monticello Railway Museum, Judy Zimmerman catches Dennis Slone (at left) and Dale Jenkins on one of MRM's recent Polar Express trains.

At the Heber Valley Railroad, the car hosts have a basic dress code of black or dark pants and skirts and a provided red or black paisley vest and a conductor style, albeit without the label. Conductors generally dress the part with a labeled conductor hat, a black vest, white shirt, matching tie, dress pants, and appropriate footwear. The engineers wear bib overalls. Any staff that is helping with special events behind the scenes wears duty-appropriate wear, which by their own choice tends to have the logo on it. Ticket office and gift shop staff just dress nicely, sometimes with a logo hat, unless there is a high volume, in which case they dress like car hosts.

It is preferable to punch tickets when possible. TVRM does use ticket stubs on the excursion trips as the conductor has to calculate the passenger miles for the FRA report. When I was there, the procedure was to collect the conductor's ticket stub as the passengers boarded the train. Once the train was underway, I would collect the stubs from the trainmen and get a count. That was recorded and also reported to the dining car steward so that they knew how many meals to expect to prepare.

Another thing that passengers notice is condition of the equipment. Torn/damaged seats should be fixed as soon as possible. TVRM has an upholstery shop on site and any seat issues were attended to promptly. If a torn seat cushion was noted on a weekday, the shop man would meet the train upon arrival at East Chattanooga to repair it. If the seat could not be repaired in place, the damaged part would be removed and usually completed within the hour. Cars were also washed weekly to protect the paint from damage by the cinders.

When I act as Station Agent for the ex-Cumberland Valley RR's Quincy Station in Norlo Park outside Chambersburg, PA in conjunction with the train ride operated by fellow members of the Cumberland Valley Chapter NRHS, I try to wear clothing appropriate for an early-1900s era agent. As our operation is in the summer-early fall, this is usually black uniform vest with black trousers, and summer-mesh uniform cap with "Station Agent" badge. When fall weather sets in I sometimes don the full black gabardine uniform suit.

Part of operating the station/museum is to back-stamp passenger's tickets with the station dater. At first I used a rubber datestamp until I had a custom brass die made for my antique validator. The kids especially enjoy watching me pound down on their tickets with the validator and keep them as souvenirs.

I also now am set-up with live morse telegraph transmissions on Saturdays using the MorseKOB program with other telegraphers.

We used validators at TVRM. Conductors were supposed to look at the back of the ticket to verify that the validation stamp was present. Using a validator in the ticket office at Grand Junction was very noisy as the desk top was not very thick.

One of our late ticket agents (Mr. Martin Treadway) was a retiree from the Southern Railway. He had served as a mobile agent and was the last telegraph operator employed by the Southern in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His father had also been a telegrapher on the Southern, starting out as a station agent up and later working in the business office in Chattanooga. Martin would always bring a working telegraph key and sounder whenever he worked and would show that to the visitors. He was one of the rare telegraphers who was fluent in both American and International Morse Code. Whatever was saved from the Chattanooga telegraph office, he saved it. He literally had a shed full of stuff that he saved when he retired.-his former boss told him to take whatever he wanted to see saved as the rest was going in the dumpster.