Strange enormous ticket machine at Birmingham New Street?

[peteb]

Does anyone recall the huge ticket machines at Birmingham New Street in the 70s? If I recall correctly the booking clerk had to dial up some letters or numbers on it to produce the tickets. I think they came off either as printed little card tickets. The machine was behind where the booking clerks sat. Maybe it was used for calculating the price too?

 

[edwin_m]

Does anyone recall the huge ticket machines at Birmingham New Street in the 70s? If I recall correctly the booking clerk had to dial up some letters or numbers on it to produce the tickets. I think they came off either as printed little card tickets. The machine was behind where the booking clerks sat. Maybe it was used for calculating the price too?

I think they had those at Piccadilly too - there was some kind of slider that could go up and down or across and must have pulled the correct ticket out of a stack. Rather like a very large juke box.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Does anyone recall the huge ticket machines at Birmingham New Street in the 70s? If I recall correctly the booking clerk had to dial up some letters or numbers on it to produce the tickets. I think they came off either as printed little card tickets. The machine was behind where the booking clerks sat. Maybe it was used for calculating the price too?

I think they had those at Piccadilly too

And Euston. Was it a London Midland region thing?

 

[RT4038]

I think they had those at Piccadilly too - there was some kind of slider that could go up and down or across and must have pulled the correct ticket out of a stack. Rather like a very large juke box.

I think they were a German (AEG) , marketed by Westinghouse in UK, machine known as a Multi-printer. They had lots of printing plates inside and printed on blank edmonson card stock. The Western Region had quite a lot of these.

 

[mailbyrail]

My father was the chief booking clerk at Chippenham in the early 1960s where Westinghouse was based. They had one of the first (perhaps the very first) machine installed. Come price change day, every single printing plate inside the machine had to be changed, a massive amount of overnight overtime.
He moved to Liverpool Lime Street where they had several machines which had different ranges of destinations which is why there was one booking window for 'Stations A-K & London' and another for 'Stations L-Z & London' (or some other ranges of letters)

 

[Dr Hoo]

My father was the chief booking clerk at Chippenham in the early 1960s where Westinghouse was based. They had one of the first (perhaps the very first) machine installed. Come price change day, every single printing plate inside the machine had to be changed, a massive amount of overnight overtime.
He moved to Liverpool Lime Street where they had several machines which had different ranges of destinations which is why there was one booking window for 'Stations A-K & London' and another for 'Stations L-Z & London' (or some other ranges of letters)

Spot on. You beat me to it. I remember them at Birmingham New Street and Euston in particular because they were visible through the glass walls of these modern stations. But other stations had them - even Birmingham Snow Hill before it ceased to be a significant station in 1967. I have operated one myself. They came in 'long' and 'short' versions.

The 'top' had a huge inertia as the clerk slid it in two dimensions to stop over the right 'cassette' and hit print. Obviously if you stopped it in the wrong place you had a 'mis-issue' to account for. Each cassette had its own counter, I believe, and you could get an 'audit roll' print of the closing numbers.

The main advantage was avoiding pre-printing tickets and thus the large racks in which to store them. But they still had distinct limitations. Fare changes was an obvious one but 'unpopular' tickets without a relevant cassette still had to processed and accounted for by hand. With each transaction being quite distinct they were quite slow although you could obviously 'repeat' a transaction for a small group making the same journey. Some clerks might pre-print a few of their most popular tickets and have them by the window for instant sale but this was frowned upon.

The whole process of handling large amounts of cash, warrants, cheques and so forth was still very cumbersome. 'Slow' service and "you're at the wrong window" could easily turn into passenger complaints as currently being touched on in other threads about 'good old BR'.

A masterpiece of German electro-mechanical engineering but not really a breakthrough.

 

[t_star2001uk]

Is this the machine that you were thinking about....

PICTURE COUTESY OF BILL WRIGHT ON FLICKR

 

[AndyPJG]

Is this the one? https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/119070-br-edmondson-ticket-printing-machines/

 

[mailbyrail]

I remember the machine in t_star's post well.
To a schoolboy who had only experienced paper and pencil, they seemed like space age technology. (Why was the pencil such a standard BR item? - cheap and easy to use?)
The illuminated greenish screen, the gentle whir after the blank ticket was loaded, the ease with which the large moveable portion slid backwards and forwards.
Compared with the racks of preprinted tickets, many of which in Chippenham were still GWR stock which had been held since before nationalisation, this seemed like Tomorrows World off the TV.

 

[Gostav]

Here, old TV series Pusteblume "Peter reist mit dem Zug" (Peter is travelling by train) showing how the ticket printer works at 5:55 but the video is only in German.

 

[Revaulx]

I remember the Manchester Piccadilly ones very clearly. They appeared very modern, but at the same time rather cumbersome. It was apparent that getting the horizontal and vertical sliders correctly aligned was quite a challenge!

 

[peteb]

Thanks everyone for the information and photos. The machine looks a bit smaller than I recall, but pretty large nevertheless! And so that's why those ticket windows at New St were A to G plus London etc, all to do with the ticket machine behind the booking clerk!

 

[47296lastduff]

The first time I saw one of these, it reminded me of a knitting machine.

 

[JBuchananGB]

I can remember a thing like that at Gidea Park in the 1960s.

 

[Taunton]

My father was the chief booking clerk at Chippenham in the early 1960s where Westinghouse was based. They had one of the first (perhaps the very first) machine installed. Come price change day, every single printing plate inside the machine had to be changed, a massive amount of overnight overtime.
He moved to Liverpool Lime Street where they had several machines which had different ranges of destinations which is why there was one booking window for 'Stations A-K & London' and another for 'Stations L-Z & London' (or some other ranges of letters)

Father should have had a word with O S Nock as he passed through the station daily. In between writing myriad railway books and magazine train timing articles, Nock was the Chief Mechanical Engineer of Westinghouse in Chippenham, and would have been involved with taking the machines into the Westinghouse catalogue, and surely also interested in their mechanical innards. Nock lived in Bath and commuted by train.

These ticket machines seem to have come in a variety of lengths; the ones at Euston were enormous.

 

[mailbyrail]

Father should have had a word with O S Nock as he passed through the station daily. In between writing myriad railway books and magazine train timing articles, Nock was the Chief Mechanical Engineer of Westinghouse in Chippenham, and would have been involved with taking the machines into the Westinghouse catalogue, and surely also interested in their mechanical innards. Nock lived in Bath and commuted by train.

These ticket machines seem to have come in a variety of lengths; the ones at Euston were enormous.

Yes, Nock was well known - but my father (now no longer with us) wasn't especially interested in the wider world of railways, he left that to me.
Chippenham was also where the Beatles filmed the railway bits of A Hard Days Night and he got quite familiar with them and Wilfred Bramble whilst they were there.
Then moving to Liverpool in the late 60s and early 70s, he had most of the stars of the day come up to the window to buy their own tickets to travel up to London - all quite normal at that time!

 

[WL113]

Is this the machine that you were thinking about....

PICTURE COUTESY OF BILL WRIGHT ON FLICKR

View attachment 84061

Indeed it will be. This photo taken at the Hallowed Birmingham Snow Hill...