Edinburgh

Bus and Tram
Tickets

1928 - 2014

 

View these 7 groups of tickets
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Comments on Photo
1.
above

1928 to 1990s

A Selection of Tickets

TOP LEFT:      TIM tickets (4 different colours of ink used):  1936, 1948, 1958, 1961

TOP CENTRE:  Bell Punch ticket, discussed in Recollections 1 to 6 on this page

CENTRE:          Ultimates (3d  ticket + 5d tickets)

TOP RIGHT:   These  are unused tickets from the end of a ticket roll from the 1990s.  I was interested to see that the backs of these tickets carry exactly the same advert as I remember on the backs of tickets in the 1950s.

Comments on Photo
2.
above

1950s to 1990s

Setright Speed + Autofare Tickets

ROWS 1 + 2:   Setright speed tickets.  These were widely used on Edinburgh buses during  my first  30 years in Edinburgh from 1963.  They were similar to TIM tickets (above), the fare, date, stage and other details being printed on the ticket in ink by the ticket machine.

However Setright tickets could usually be printed up to higher values than TIM tickets, so throughout Britain Setright tickets were often to be found in use on some of the longer distance journeys.

ROWS 3 + 4: Autofare tickets from around 1980s.  It was around this time that I found bus tickets were becoming less interesting to me and less collectable.  Much of the detail printed on these tickets by the Autofare ticket machines was in code.

Comments on Photo
3.
above

1970s and 2012

Autofare Tickets

ROWS 1 + 2:  Here are a few more Autofare tickets, together with a selection of adverts on the backs of Autofare tickets.

ROWS 3 + 4: This is the style of  style of Autofare ticket now being used by Lothian Buses (in 2014).

Comprehensive details (Driver, Bus, Date, Service etc.) are printed on the front of these tickets whilst the back invariably carries an advert, some quite colourful, as in 2 of the 3 examples on this page.

Comments on Photo
4.
above

1980s to 2000s

Wayfarer Tickets

These tickets are all an earlier style of Wayfarer ticket, in use from around the 1980s until the early-2000s.

The red line of text running along the centre of these tickets was pre-printed on the tickets before the roll before it was put into the ticket machine.

There were several variations in this line of text.  The wording, the colour, the font and the size of type were all changed over the years.  In my collection I have over 20 different variations:

-  Some used the name of 'LRT' (Lothian Region Transport)

-  Some used the company's later name, 'Lothian Buses'.

-  Some included a small advert after the company name.  e.g. for 'Burger King' or 'KFC'.  

Larger, and often colourful, adverts appeared on the backs of this style of Wayfarer tickets.  Examples of some of these can be found in the lower part of Photo 4 (above) and in Photo 5 (below).

Comments on Photo
5.
above

1980s to 2000

Wayfarer Tickets

Here are more examples of adverts on the backs of Wayfarer tickets from the 1980s to  early-2000s.

Comments on Photo
6.
above

1972 to 1985 (and a tram ticket from 2014)

Season Tickets and Tram Ticket

MOST OF PAGE:  Season Tickets.  Several were my own tickets. I went early to buy my First Season Ticket, from Shrubhill, early in the morning of the first day they were on sale, so the number of my ticket was '010001'.  I kept this number for about 20 years.

BOTTOM-RIGHT:  Ticket for Edinburgh's new trams (front and back).  The first 100,000 tickets printed were described as being 'limited edition with platinum back''.

The  backs of the tram tickets now being issued are white.  There is a  'Ridacard' Advert "The more you travel, the more you save." on the backs of these tickets.

Comments on Photo
7.
above

1987 to 2002

Season Tickets

Here are more season tickets.  This page includes:
               - '1-week', '4-week' and '1-year' tickets.

The last ticket on the page is the most recent ticket.  It's a '1-year' ticket that includes a security emblem, as a safeguard against fraud.

Recollections

1.

David Scott

Edinburgh

Thank you to David Scott for sending the response below after seeing some of the Edinburgh tickets on this page.

David, who was a conductor for Eastern Scottish, based at their New Street Garage in Edinburgh for the summers of 1973-75, wrote:

Bus Tickets

"When I saw the bus tickets above, memories came flooding back.  Well done for keeping them!  How many did we throw away?

Setright Machines

They produced the tickets
 in Photo 2 above.

    ©

"It's nice that you have the Setright tickets from Scottish Omnibuses' (SOL)  ‘Eastern scottisH’  services.

Edinburgh City Transport (ECT) also used a Setright tickets.  They could cope with a range of fares up to 1 shilling in half-penny increments. This was ‘decimalised’ to give a range of fares up to 11.5p in 1971.  I remember when the top fare went up to 13p, maybe in 1973,  and conductors had to print two 6.5p tickets."

Bus Fares

"Do you remember that at decimalisation , the ECT fares were:
6d, 1s, 1/6d for 3, 6 & 9 stages?  

Then they became 2.5p, 5p and 7.5p?   Before ’71 was out, they’d up’d it to 3p ,5p, 8p and soon to 3p ,6p, 9p

Setright Machines

SOL Eastern Scottish used Setright machines that had two dials, originally ne for shillings and one for pence. so they could cope with fares up to 19/11 before decimalisation and up to £1.99 after decimalisation.

The notes above are is an abbreviated extract from emails
received from David Scott, Edinburgh:  28 +30 October, 2015.

Collecting Bus Tickets

I enjoyed collecting bus tickets, as a teenager around 1960.  It was not an expensive hobby, as most were found, rather than purchased (except when I needed to catch a but to school

I became a member of the Transport Ticket Society for a few years and found their publications informative.

I still keep my old bus tickets now, but find them to be far less interesting than those that I used to collect.

Bus Fares

I don't remember the Edinburgh fares that you mention in Edinburgh around the time of decimalisation, but I do remember the fares that I paid:

-  to the school in Bradford from the age of eleven:
          3d every time.  There was no fare increase at all, 1956-63

-  to work in Edinburgh for the first few years from 1963:
           3d (again).   I believe that ECT fares then were 3d, 6d, 9d.

I also remember some of the other prices around that time.

-  The cost of a postage stamp then was 2.5d, then it went up to 3d.

These prices seem very cheap by today's standards. (3d = approx £0.01)  even if we allow for inflation.  (The RPI  increased  by a factor of about 20 between 1960 and 2014.)

Peter Stubbs, Edinburgh:  October 30, 2015

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