Turn the Handle Once

The old bus ticket was a tiny act of geography. Not the romantic kind, no contour lines or folded sheets spread across a cafe table, just a thin strip of paper with a fare, a date, sometimes a stage number, and the faint authority of something a conductor had made in front of you while the bus moved.

A Setright machine looked too heavy for such a small output. It sat against the body on a strap, all dials, levers, counters, and crank, a portable accounting office for a public vehicle. The conductor selected the fare, turned the handle once, and the machine printed a receipt from a blank roll. Inside, mechanical counters kept the money total and the number of tickets issued. No battery. No network. One hand, one fare, one small proof that the journey had entered the books.

This is not just nostalgia for paper. Paper was often inconvenient and occasionally absurd. It got damp. It hid in coat pockets. It collected in handfuls at the bottom of school bags and handbags, each one too official to throw away immediately and too trivial to keep. However, the printed bus ticket belonged to a system in which travel still had to be declared locally. You did not simply tap into a metropolitan abstraction called mobility. You told someone where you were going.

The TIM machines used in the Tees Valley from the late 1940s make the point beautifully. The museum description has the conductor dialling a price, turning a handle, and producing a ticket that showed boarding stage, price paid, and date. That stage number matters. It tied the fare to a sequence of places: not just distance, but a route understood as named segments, stops, boundaries, little civic units of movement.

London had its own machine culture. Transport for London's archive guide notes that Bell Punch and TIM machines were replaced by Gibson machines between 1952 and 1958, while Setrights were used on Green Line coaches where a larger range of fares was required. The archive names the dull, lovely paperwork around the machines too: conductor instructions, garage procedures, emergency tickets, staff instructions for Gibson, TIM, Almex, Setright, and Ultimate designs. Ticketing was not a mere transaction. It was a discipline with manuals.

I wrote about rural bus shelters that survive after the service has gone, and the ticket machine feels like the smaller companion object. The shelter is the fixed trace, concrete at the edge of a road. The ticket is the moving trace, carried away in a pocket, creased between fingers, then lost. Both belong to a version of public transport that made its promises visible. A roof here. A fare stage there. A printed timetable behind perspex. A conductor with a bag and a machine that clicked.

What changed with driver-only operation, smartcards, and contactless payment was not only convenience. Convenience is real, and I use it without moral drama. A modern ticket machine can store hundreds of routes, track the bus for an app, accept cards, and send messages to drivers. That is genuinely useful. It also dissolves the encounter. The fare becomes a backend event, settled somewhere between a reader, a bank, a transport account, and a data system that knows far more about the journey than the old paper strip ever did.

The Setright did not know much. That was part of its dignity. It knew the fare it had printed, the count it had advanced, the date the conductor had set. It made no behavioural profile and predicted no demand. It did not care whether the same passenger travelled at 8:12 every morning or only on wet Thursdays. Its knowledge was narrow, physical, and accountable in the old literal sense: read the counter, fill in the waybill, pay in the takings.

There is a sound I associate with this whole vanished arrangement, though I cannot swear the memory is clean. The snap of the ticket, the bag shifting against a hip, coins moving somewhere close by, the crank giving its little mechanical answer. A bus was never quiet, so the machine had to join the noise rather than dominate it. It was just another rhythm inside the vehicle.

Now the proof of the journey is mostly elsewhere. On a card statement, in an app, in a database, as a line item only the system really sees. The old ticket was less efficient and less clever, but it let the journey leave a mark small enough to lose and specific enough to remember.

Sources:

The TIM: Ticket Issuing Machine — Tees Valley Museums

Setright Bus Ticket Machine — Kimyo / Oxford Bus Museum

Fares and Ticketing on London's Buses, Trolleybuses and First Generation Trams — Transport for London

'SET RIGHT' Fare Register Ticket Machine, 1950s — Museum of Technology

Then and Now: Milton Keynes Bus Operator Shows How Bus Ticket Machine Technology Has Changed — Milton Keynes Citizen