Reading passage
Anna Brooks lives in Leeds, a city in the north of England. Her sister Clare lives in Bristol, nearly two hundred miles away. Anna does not have a car, and the bus takes more than six hours. So when Clare invited her to a birthday party, Anna decided to travel by train. She had not been on a train for years, and she was surprised by how much had changed.
Buying a train ticket is simple today, but it was not always so easy. In the early days of the railways, in the 1830s, every ticket was written by hand. A railway worker sat in a small office and wrote the passenger's name, the date, and the destination on a piece of paper. When trains became popular and thousands of people travelled every day, this system was far too slow. Queues at ticket offices grew longer and longer.
The problem was solved by a man named Thomas Edmondson. In the 1840s, he invented a new kind of ticket made from thick card. Each card was printed in advance with the names of two stations. The worker only had to stamp the date on the card before selling it. The cards were small, all exactly the same size, so they were easy to store and easy to check. Edmondson's system was so successful that railways all over the world used it for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Anna had never seen a card ticket. When she arrived at Leeds station, she found a row of ticket machines next to the ticket office. The machine asked where she wanted to go and when she wanted to travel. She paid with her bank card, and a paper ticket came out in less than a minute. Many passengers did not use the machines at all. They showed their phones at the ticket gates instead, because their tickets were stored in an app.
Before her journey, Anna spent an evening learning about ticket types on the railway website. A single ticket takes you to your destination, while a return ticket brings you home again. The cheapest tickets are called advance tickets. They are sold for a particular train on a particular day, and they go on sale about twelve weeks before the journey. The earlier you buy, the less you usually pay.
There are also cheaper tickets for certain groups of people. Students and young people between sixteen and twenty-five can buy a railcard. The railcard costs thirty pounds a year, but it cuts the price of most tickets by a third. Older people and families can buy railcards too. Anna calculated that a railcard would save her money after only two journeys, so she bought one online before booking anything else.
Anna also learned about peak and off-peak travel. Trains that arrive in big cities before half past nine in the morning are full of people going to work, and tickets for these trains cost more. Tickets for quieter times, known as off-peak tickets, are much cheaper. Because the party was on a Saturday, Anna could travel off-peak in both directions, which made her journey cheaper still.
In the end, Anna booked an advance ticket on the website and paid with her bank card. Her e-ticket arrived by email a few minutes later. The whole journey cost her twenty-eight pounds, less than half the normal price. On the day of the party, she scanned the code on her phone at the ticket gate and walked straight to the platform. The train to Bristol took just over three hours, and she arrived with a smile on her face.
Paper tickets are slowly disappearing from British stations, and many people are sad to see them go. Some travellers have collected card tickets for decades, keeping them as souvenirs of special journeys. A few old tickets are now worth a lot of money to collectors. Anna kept her ticket from the Bristol trip too, not for its value, but to remember a wonderful weekend with her sister.