Edmondson Tickets

You may have seen the above piece of artwork, which shows a collage of Edmondson tickets, when it was displayed on a noticeboard at Pickering Station; you may be familiar with Edmondson tickets anyway, the card ones which are the travel ticket from some stations on the NYMR. The ones used at the NYMR are exactly the same kind of ticket which were issued in the past not only in the North Eastern Railway area but widely across England. They are an important part of the celebration of the heritage of our railway. 

The NYMRT’s Museum Collection includes a very large selection of Edmondson tickets. They are from a variety of locations within the North Eastern Region (NER) area as well as more recent ones from NYMR, although many of the NYMR ones are now quite old, with the earliest from 1969!

History of Edmondson tickets

With the changes we have all seen on railways over the years and tickets for travel now often digital only, accessed via mobile phones, you might wonder why the Edmondson ticket is so important to the history of railways.

Thomas Edmondson (1752 – 1851) devised the idea of a new type of railway ticket while he was working as a station master on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway. His proposal was that a small piece of cardboard, pre-printed with journey details, could be used to replace the system at that time where all tickets were hand-written paper bills. Clearly, the idea of a range of standard pre-printed tickets as passenger numbers continued to grow, was a great idea.

He invented a machine which would print the small cardboard tickets in batches complete with serial numbers. His machines and their improved successors quickly became the standard for British and other railways. He had 3 patents in the 1840s for the design and improvement of printers and they were built by his company until Waterlow and sons took over the manufacture of them.

Having sequential serial numbers on the tickets was important as the daily ticket sales were recorded in the daily ticket sales ledgers, noting the start and end ticket numbers by type. This practice continued at the NYMR for many years as part of the range of duties of the booking office clerks until all travellers were also given a computer generated ticket. The Archival Collection has many examples of the ticket ledgers which show how daily sales were recorded and the extract below from Grosmont Station records shows how the daily entries were recorded.

Edmondson tickets were first used in 1840 on the Manchester and Leeds Railway with the last tickets issued on the mainline railway in 1990.

Printing Edmondson tickets at the NYMR

The printing of Edmondson card tickets for the NYMR was for many years carried out under contract by the Edmondson Ticket Printing Co Ltd located on the Isle of Mull. The company printed tickets for a large number of railways and was able to supply NYMR with the range of colours of tickets (one colour per station) along with the variety of types of fares on offer – including tickets for dogs!

However, in recent years, the card tickets have been printed by NYMR volunteers using printing machines which they restored to full working use. The aim is that Edmondson tickets are available from NYMR stations, issued alongside computer generated printed or digital tickets as a reminder of this important aspect of heritage: Platform tickets are available at Goathland so for any non-travellers visiting the NYMR, you might want to buy one of these as a lovely reminder.

Wherever Edmondson tickets are issued, they are date stamped to validate them for travel – this is done by booking clerks using a ticket stamping machine – we have several of these in the Archive and each Booking Office at NYMR still has one.

If you would like to know more about Edmondson tickets in our Collection, please contact the Archive Team [email protected].