Hi,

I do not know if there is any interest in seeing how it was done, but has anyone tried a demonstration of how a 1920 or 1940 or 1885 use "The Official Guide to the Railways" to route a person from say Attica, New York to Chama, New Mexico?

Finding the routing and writing out the ticket book?

Doug vV

I think "young 'uns" today will be fascinated/flabbergasted enough just to hear how one purchased tickets for a mainline steam excursion in the 1970s, 1980s, or even 1990s.

Magazine ads months in advance. Flyers and mailing lists. Mail. Phone calls. Money orders. Self-addressed stamped envelopes.

Seriously--has anyone in the modern excursion era done smart-phone "e-tickets" yet?

Before the ticket books came around there were the long coupon tickets which each segment being often filled in by rubber stand or hand.

Official Guides often were passed down the line month by month. The first office to get them was often a major city depot or downtown sales office. Then Guides were routed month by month to smaller communities, etc.

The accepted routes and alternatives were described in the tariff books along with the amount to collect. There were separate tariff books issued for one-way fares and round-trip fares and for joint regions and individual on-line sales.

In your example there would be alternatives for the travel Chicago to Denver. And maybe Buffalo to Chicago. The fare from Attica was probably computed by an add-on to the fare from Buffalo. Similarly the fare into Chama was probably an add-on from another point in Colorado.

Them similarly the Pullman Company had its own tariff for Pullman space.

For Pullman space or reserved coach (or chair car) space the local agent would call or probably wire a request to the appropriate reservation office. Space was assigned to the principal cities along the route depending on expected needs. When the train past, the unsold space was released down the line and/or to the train conductor by specific instructions.The full telling of how this was done is a story in itself.

I have a 1948 Western Joint Passenger Tariff of One-Way Fares from stations in California, Nevada and Utah to destinations in the Rocky Mountains states and west. After I got it years ago, I spent many an evening reading the alternate routes and thinking about how a traveling salesman might put together a trip.

Hi,

When I researched my book on the Gainesville Midland, I had a few pages of the old Guides and ORER's crumble in my hands.

I've scanned some 150-200 onto CD/DVD's for posterity and sold them publicly for a while. Long sad unimportant story.

If anyone wants copies of these and will pay for materials, I'll see if I can locate the raw info (which hard drive) and make copies. I can not give them out free - I'm unemployed.

The earliest I have is an American Railroad Guide from 1851 (I think) and the first Official Guide and ORER.

Contact me back channel at edgarcorny ta gmail commercial.

Doug vV

I was lucky enough to stumble across a few said tickets that were unissued, including a few from the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway (1890s) with all of the coupons present (most still attached).

Even in the computer age, some railways still use tickets with coupons. As far as I know, TVRM still uses tickets with coupons for the local and excursion trains. In those cases, the coupons are the agent's stub on the local tickets and the agent's stub, conductor's stub and dining car steward's stub on the excursion trains. I worked as both an agent and conductor and those stubs were used for accounting purposes. The agent's stubs were turned in at the end of the day with their receipts. Conductors used the stubs to compute the data for the mileage reports-I remember spending much time sitting at a vacant table in the dining car, counting the stubs from each station and calculating the mileage for the report (passengers could and often did board from on line stations at Rossville, Chickamauga or La Fayette). Most common was to board passengers at Rossville.

We also did occasional on board ticket sales for certain trains. Tickets sold by the conductor were subject to a 10% tariff if the passenger boarded at a station with an open ticket office. No need to reinvent the wheel-we just dusted off old passenger fare rules and used them. We did not make the passengers sign the tickets (common in the old days).

This brings to mind another scenario:

Has your line or operation ever engaged in ticket-selling outside the norm of walking up to the ticket office?

One time, I had a friend that wanted to see the Walkersville Southern operation, but detained by a traffic jam at an accident, we arrived too late for the final train of the day. So we simply chased the train southbound, and at the southern end of the line (Harmony Grove), I told him to go up and offer to pay for a ride back--at least he'd get the "mileage." They eagerly accommodated him.

When I visited the Strathspey Railway in Scotland in 1991, there was still a sizeable gap between their depot and the ScotRail depot, which had to be navigated on foot. My BR train arrived late, just as their train was scheduled to depart, and I hastily dashed into the BR depot as I passed through and asked them to ring the other railway and have them hold for a connecting passenger. I darted the third of a mile or so up the street and alley, with a wrong turn or two, through an underpass, up the drive to the platform, dashed into the open door on the last carriage, slammed it shut, waved a "rightaway" to the driver, and we departed--and then I had to confront the guard who was ready to take my cash fare "by the book," including paying the extra penalty for not having a ticket upon boarding. They had to issue little "extra fare" ticket receipts, the old-fashioned way, in 30p increments; I think I still have some here somewhere......

A bit of humor, this scene came to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6fVmTfmtYc

try getting thru chicago today...

you just get out your schedules from the railroads you use, match up your arrival/destination wait times stay over times and yer off.

Amen to dinwitty on Chicago. I rode from Portland to Chicago to connect with the road to Dallas. But, the arrival in Chicago, even as it was in time, did not connect by 30 minutes to head south. So, an overstay for the night was required. The bad part is that when the southbound reaches San Antonio, there is a delay of over 6 hours (last time I looked) before one could go east or west, so what was the hurry to get a train out of Chicago just to lay over in San Antonio at the other end? Bad connections all the way around.

Anytime I collected cash fares on board, I made a notation in my Conductor's Book. I kept a Conductor's book for most of the time that I worked as a conductor. Noted all sorts of events/incidents from grade crossing collisions to passenger injuries (none severe thankfully). Other odd cases recorded included the occasional mixed train and transportation of human remains.

I should note that the mixed trains were never planned as such. It was more a case of discovering that there were freight cars waiting to be moved and accommodating the request of the host railroad occasionally.

When we did serve the Chattanooga Choo Choo, we usually had an agent drive down to the station to sell tickets in advance of the train's arrival. On the railroad timetable, the Choo Choo was still referred to as Terminal Station and all agent's reports reflected that. On the rare occasion that an agent was unavailable, the tickets were sold on the train without the surcharge.

Union Switch & Signal Infomat system


http://rrsignal.com/photos/thumbnails.php?album=165

-Hudson

You know Amtrak went in backflips to integrate into the SABRE system (the airline reservation system of the 80s etc.) and SABRE went into backflips to integrate with Amtrak. That's part of the reason the Amtrak website was so annoying for many years.


And that's why online ticketing happened. That is on the shortlist of things the Internet improved.


Side-effect of online ticketing. Building your own in-house online ticketing system from scratch was done by no railway museum ever. You hire onto already-built, third party ticketing systems like Whistletix, Vendini, etc who recover their costs from convenience charges (so they are revenue neutral for you.) THEY decide to support smartphone ticketing, and you get swept into it. A customer walks up and shows you a phone, and all the on-screen data looks right (where are my glasses?), and you let them on the train because the alternative is creating a scene in front of customers.


Of course you do. You do whatever it takes. That's what human interaction is. They went to a great deal of trouble to enjoy your heritage railroad, and you're there out of avocation, how do you NOT help them? And this is, as in your examples, often improvised and ad-hoc. They're not there to fleece you, so a fare almost always gets paid, usually without asking.

Once, I was giving a Bay Area transit tour to an Amtrak VP of Marketing. The J had only started running to Balboa Park and we were chatting with the operator. We pulled up behind 130, which was out for testing. The J man tooted his horn, threw his door open and told us to run up there. We got a grand ride over the Duboce hill to Church/Market, where we transferred to the KLM downtown. All on our $1 Muni transfer.

I am somewhat a purist when it comes to railroad preservation, and I believe historical accuracy is important in what we do.

How about preprinted tickets with detachable coupons (for various parts of the trip) stamped with the date and station of origin? Yeah, takes time and doesn't lend itself to internet sales, etc. but tickets printed out from a computer sort of shatters the illusion of a historic train ride, eh? I know, lots of things shatter that illusion (Diesel switchers pulling passenger trains, for one) but this is an area we can make pretty authentic. How can we make our train rides different from riding a commuter train of Amtrak? Being as historically accurate as possible, when practicable.

Wasn't too long ago (mid-1990's) CSX issued preprinted tickets with detachable coupons and the date stamped on the back for MARC trains leaving Camden Station; of course this was when Camden was stilled manned.

I realize the convenience factor for the railroad, as well as money invested in computer based ticketing, will prevail but I thought I would throw an idea out there.

At least computer issued tickets aren't quite as noisy to issue. Using the validator in our ticket office (versus the gift shop where most tickets were issued) was a very noisy affair. The design of the agent's counter and the acoustics of the room made it sound like you were hitting the counter with a hammer every time you stamped a ticket. Tickets were only issued from the agent's office if we had the staff necessary and usually only on high traffic days.

I have printed tickets on heavy color paper that can be obtained fairly cheaply at Staples. I also use a paper cutter they sell that has a "light perforation" mode that essentially creates detachable sections.

I did use a ticket validator. There were at one time rubber "booties" made for them that greatly deadens the sound. Aside from being authentic, use of the validator prevented someone from making duplicate tickets which can be a problem today with advanced sale tickets - no one is checking to see if those ticket numbers are different, but no stamp (or one that is printed and not indented) is a sure sign of a forgery.