Physical description

Ticket - 2 1/2d, MMTB black printing on light brown paper with the value in green ink. A transfer ticket matched with Reg Item 5522. Has a "Victoria Bitter" print on the rear. Ticket No. R799195



Advice from Dean Filgate 7/1/2020 for this item and 5522:



"very interesting tickets (why can't I find gems like these when I haunt old bookshops ?) and even better - a matched transfer pair !



The transfer is (I think) from the original McCaskey Systems printing for the "great fare revision" of March 1921, when most fares rose by ½d (or 1d on Sundays & Public Holidays), and is on the wider paper stock of those issues. The 2½d is from a later printing on narrower (but still "long") paper stock, but retains the black + coloured (value) ink on white paper scheme. The original issues had McCaskey's imprint and the value repeated on the back. They are a very nice pair.



At some stage in the early/mid-1920s coloured paper tickets were again produced alongside the white-paper issues, before totally replacing them. Some of the colours were also altered. Sands & McDougall cornered the ticket-printing market about this time, blitzing all opposition with a press that produced 57 tickets at once - compared to everyone else's 2-at-a-time presses (Geoff Dean has more information on this). The "horizontal" format (similar to Sydney) was trialled in the late 1920s, and deemed a failure.



The number of sections, their direction, and the use of Up/Down or In/Out varied over the years - I have put together a 'chronology' in order of issue, but unfortunately cannot assign dates of issue (yet ? ).



2nd email of 10/1/2021



Yes - keep those two tickets paired together (most people don't ); the only other matched transfer pair that I have seen was in Travis Jeffrey's collection.



The 2½d ticket is a mid-1920s printing (from Sands & McDougall, so I am led to believe), the design being re-worked from their previous batch that had this value in red. There may have been another slight revision before the next design - of horizontal (Sydney-type) tickets - were issued. It would appear that horizontal format had already been used by the cable trams well before the electric trams, and that this "next horizontal issue" was used for both cable and electric trams.



What I neglected to say before, was that this is an Electric System issue - as denoted by the "E.S." at the top: the alternate heading was "CABLE TRAMWAYS". Most enthusiasts mistake those initials to mean "Eastern System": demonstrably it is not, because there were "E.S." tickets issued specifically for use at Coburg and Essendon depots only (mostly return fares, with the destinations marked on the ticket).