Accrington Railways - Robert Kenyon

Ticketing In the early days of the railway in Accrington trains were often held on the Viaduct for inspectors to collect the tickets before the trains entered the station. This was not only the cause of congestion but also of great annoyance to the passengers. The purchase and dissemination of tickets was a long, tedious and time consuming business, which was the cause of much frustration for clerks, angry passengers and many missed trains. Booking clerks were supplied with a book of counterfoils, which had to be filled in by hand stating on both sides the passenger’s name, the destination and the date, with one portion being separated for the traveller to retain, whilst the stub was then kept on a spike and used for accounting purposes. As can be seen this method was open to much abuse, which translated into a loss of revenue by the railways. However, a certain Thomas Edmonson, who was born in Lancaster in 1792, came up with a method which would revolutionise the sale of tickets on the railways. He had been apprenticed to Gillow, the famous furniture maker, and had a mind full of inventive ideas, one which was of immense value to the railway companies. This was to number tickets rather than name them. If these pre-printed cards were numbered, contained the stations identity with that of the intended destination, and placed in a dispensing tube with the lowest numbered at the bottom and the highest at the top, all that was required was for them to be stamped with a date before sale to the intending passenger. He went to a Mr Blaylock, a watchmaker and friend, and he constructed a device on these lines. The first Company to install these ticket machines was the Manchester & Leeds, and for this he was paid at the rate of half a sovereign per mile of line per year. Soon afterwards, Captain William Scarth Moorsom, a director, introduced the new system on the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway, to be followed by his brother, Captain Constantine Richard Moorsom, of the North Western Railway. This system was very soon adopted by all railway companies in Britain and then all over the world. From this Edmonson became a very rich man. It was estimated that by the outbreak of the Great War there were over one-thousand-million tickets dispensed by this method, and over three-quarters of a million on the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. The L & Y remained a customer of the Edmonson system, until they brought it ‘in house’ in August, 1921. The L & Ys early tickets were coloured - Class Return Single 1st yellow/white white 2nd pink/sky blue dark pink 3rd orange/green green Day/Half day excursion off-white with coloured hatching - Child annual season 3rd green/black/ yellow - Bicycle scarlett @ 6d for 25 miles

Edmonson’s younger brother, George, who was a renowned educationalist at Tulketh Hall School, also had a railway connection, in that he had his pupils study Bradshaw’s Guide. They became skilled in the art of devising railway schedules, diagrams of working and timetables, as part of their education. Several of these young men found meaningful employment on the railways having gained these skills.

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