TRAMWAY FARES

Evening Star, Issue 23351, 22 August 1939, Page 10

TRAMWAY FARES

THE DAILY TASK OF COUNTING OVER A HUNDREDWEIGHT OF SMALL SILVER AND COPPER REGULAR STAFF EMPLOYED Attached to even the most mundane affairs there is romance. Take, for instance, the humble tram, or, to be more accurate, the conductor who gathers in the odd threepenny pieces and the twopenny fares. Multiply the takings of this conductor nearly 150 times and there you have romance. Piles and piles of silver and copper. Over a hundredweight of it! Just a day’s takings on a city’s transport system. See it all amassed together, pell mell, or neatly counted in tiny tiers and that trite saying of the spendthrift that money was made round to go round is forcibly borne in upon the mind. Into the counting house of the city’s transport department come piles of silver and copper each day. This constitutes the loose change of the populace. Each dav it is counted, stacked, carried off, and paid into the banks, where it is just as quickly paid out again to this one and that one. So it goes the rounds; into the workers pockets, to the stores, bade into the pockets of Mr John Citizen, and his wife, and back to the tramway revenue office. What a story one stray threepenny piece could tell if we could but trace its wanderings in the course of a day. When we step on to a tram or bus and receive a punched ticket for a very small sum, we give little thought to the tremendous amount of work this and similar sales in the aggregate involve. Nearly 23,000,000 million passengers are carried on corporation vehicles every year, and there’s a ticket for each one. Every ticket sold and every coin' received has to be accounted for. Every day in our local depot 147 boxes, with _ the necessary waybill, punch, and tickets, have to be made up, and each conductor issued with change. The docket in each box records the number of tickets issued, and thereon the conductor records his sales each trip at the end of his shift (of which there are two), making up his sales for the day. To fully cover this phase of the work three sets of boxes are constantly in use, and it is no small task attending to them. At the end of his day the conductor hands in his box to a clerk, for there is always one on duty. His takings are checked and a small receipt given. So accurate is the (to the layman) complicated system of check that the officer in the depot, were you to pick up an old ticket in a tram or off the street and hard it to them, would be able to tell you exactly on what line and trip it was sold and the day. COUNTING THE COINS. Each morning the work of recounting all the coin commences. If one had to handle something like 20,000 coins he would get a fair conception of the work involved. On an average week-end. as the last one, for instance, in large silver there are 4,800 coins, 3,430 in sixpenny pieces, and 6,160 threepenny pieces, to say nothing of over 5,000 coppers and Halfpence. It’s a work of some magnitude and keeps five of a staff on the alert until after 11 a.m. One appreciates the accuracy with which a bank teller handles his bundles of coins, but even they are excelled in speed by these revenue clerks of the city’s transport systeip, especially when it comes to counting small change. Huge piles of threepenny pieces vanish under the lightning manipulation of nimble fingers and are scooped into bags containing £25 each. A DAILY CHECK. Day in, day out, year in and year out this work goes on, and in the course of a year nearly £200,000 is handled in this way, mostly in loose change. Of course, each day there is a percentage of notes in the takings, not gathered in by the conductors but from ,the depots where concession tickets* are sold. Very rarely is any mistake made in the counting, either by the conductors handing in their boxes or by the record clerks, but so comprehensive is the system of check that any minor mistake is soon located.

One duty of these checkers of all this small loose change is to watch for any spurious coin, but to find one is a very rare thing indeed. In a country or city such as ours, where armed raids do not occur, there is little fear for the safety of all this money, which lies in piles about the rooms, but of course precautions are taken against surprise. Each day after lunch the bags of coin are carefully stowed away into leather carrying hags and taken to the bank, where they arc weighed and duly

credited to the corporation. Such is the routine, such is the work, the romance of which is hidden from the members of the public who, individually, help to create it.