This story turned up today in Metro Magazine:


https://www.metro-magazine.com/digital- ... -behind-it

This has me thinking.

We are now on the second or third, or even fourth, generation of replacements for paper tickets and transit tokens. Magnetic strip tickets are passé, and now the first generation of permanent RFID cards are being replaced by smartphone readers. Turnstiles are being replaced by things that can't be jumped, too.

Are we saving this history?

When Baltimore's MTA introduced its CharmCard in 2010, I took pains to gather up prototype cards and the literature related to its introduction, in part by signing up to be a beta tester. That system was phased out by the end of 2025.

We're already at the point where old cash fareboxes are obsolete, and we have to explain such things as tokens and transfers to young people. I've seen some transit museums issue authentic old-time tokens to be used to "pay the fare" on the ride and "issue" reproduction "transfers." At some point, will we have to salvage (or, worse, reproduce) an old Metro farecard vending machine and put it in the gallery next to the fareboxes and ticket punches? Or has some forward-looking transit museum already done so?

Similarly, train tickets are becoming a thing of the past, and the old ritual of a conductor punching a ticket no doubt confuses some young people. Can we make it educational as well?

I remember a debate in one archive workroom where we were handling some Amtrak tickets from the 1980s that were handwritten at a travel agency on airline-ticket carbon forms, which were in some railfan's collection left to the museum (as I recall, for the Broadway Limited and very early Pennsylvanians). They said "not Amtrak tickets"; I replied "This is how untold thousands of Amtrak tickets were written back then! Just as real as anything printed up at an Amtrak station!" They ultimately filed the "representative" tickets.......

New York Transit Museum has a really cool history of turnstyles on display. I'm sure the metro card will be added to the museum as well now that it has been retired.

I've got my own personal "collection" - if you want to call a shoebox of tickets a collection! haha.

I have a shoebox full of tickets from various tourist lines and excursions, but the idea of preserving this generations commercial ticketing experience is worth thinking about.

And this is exactly what I was talking about. Shoeboxes are not archival, for one thing!

Over 25 years ago I watched volunteers at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum sort through several such "shoebox collections" (actually a couple boxes each), from several estates, of streetcar transfers from Baltimore streetcar lines (and some bus lines included). Hundreds or thousands per collection.

Now, they ran into exactly the same quandary as such archives face with timetables and Official Guides--do you really have either the room OR the need for a "complete set" of these things? Is it OCD driving such compulsion, or serious need? What the heck do you DO with them, anyway???

If you're the "technical & historical society" for the railroad, maybe you can justify a complete set of public timetables for that railroad. But no one else. And ticketing? Forget it, impossible. And I struggle to remember the last time I had to flip through consecutive issues of an Official Guide to figure out when a line was abandoned or a passenger service was terminated. (In my real experience, they tend to be not very reliable for that duty, as listings often lagged actual service changes for anything but primary services by months.)

To the credit of the BSM guys, they came to their senses, pulled aside the best representative collection, and surplused the others for sale in the gift shop.

The issue is to curate such a collection (as well as everything else in the place, of course), make it make sense to a non-OCD visitor, and present it in a way that they learn about it and come to care about it.

I mean, there will literally come a day in the (very near?) future when we're going to be saying "Remember when we actually had to print out boarding passes for airplane trips and have them ready to be scanned at the gate?!?"

The Baltimore Streetcar Museum has the right idea or at least a start:

The New York Transit Museum's Grand Central Gallery (within the gift shop) has a rotating exhibit and it currently is "Inspired by MetroCard explores how this everyday transit object evolved into a powerful artistic medium and source of inspiration for artists, designers, and cultural institutions over three decades."

I bought a lapel pin of a metro card machine! They have the best gift shop there. And if you want to add to your collection, they sell old subway tokens preserved in a variety of ways.