Found – Louisville Railway School Ticket

It’s fun to find other collectibles in numismatic purchases. These found objects provide opportunities to learn.

For example, from dictionary.com, an exonumist is a person who collects exonumia. Exonumia is plural for items, such as tokens or medals, which resemble money but are not intended to circulate as money. Related to this area, a vecturist is a person who collects transportation tokens as a hobby. (By the way, the word “exonumia” originated in the mid-1960s with the “num” portion coming from the word numismatic. From the American Vecturist Association site, the word ‘vecturist’ is derived from the Latin word ‘vectura’, which means ‘passage of money.’)

These words were found as a result of a search for a Louisville Railway School Ticket.

One side shows “Louisville Railway.”

Louisville Railway School Ticket

The other side has “school ticket.”

School Ticket Louisville Railway

This metal disc with the square hole in the middle was used by school children riding the railway to and from school.

In AERA Volume 9 by the American Electric Railway Association for August 1920 through July 1921, Samuel Riddle, Vice-President of the Louisville Railway Company, answered questions regarding the issuance of school tickets:

In the July 1907 Official Railway Guide (and other modes of transportation), school tickets were listed as a subset of commutation tickets:

But, so far, finding a picture of a school ticket just like this one has been difficult.

On the token catalog site, one of the Louisville Railway tokens looks very similar but is made of a different metal.

Likewise, on the exonumist web site, a search for Louisville Railway School Tickets yields the Atwood-Coffee #KY510AK Louisville Railway token. It has a similar design and looks to be the same metal as the one on the token catalog site.  They note that their token’s metal is zinc.

Intrigued further, a search on Atwood-Coffee gave another bit of information. THE reference for transportation tokens is the Atwood-Coffee Catalogue of United States and Canadian Transportation Tokens.

The first known token catalog effort began in 1920 by F.C. Kenworthy. After a few years, he passed the work to R.W. Dunn who had his list printed in 1932. Next, Ronald C. Atwood accepted the task to continue cataloging the transportation tokens. In 1948, Mr. Atwood worked with the American Numismatic Company of Los Angeles to print the growing list of tokens.

Later in 1948, the American Vecturist Association (AVA) was formed in New York due to the interest garnered by the publication of the Fare Box by R.L. Moore, a monthly newsletter about transportation tokens.  Mr. Moore passed the publication of the Fare Box to John Coffee.

Simple deduction assumes the Atwood-Coffee Catalogue, which consists of three volumes and continues to be updated periodically, includes much of the work compiled by Ronald C. Atwood and John Coffee.

On the AVA site, they provide an extensive token values Excel workbook for downloading. The file contains several different spreadsheets that include the Atwood-Coffee catalog values for many different tokens – over 10,000 in the USA spreadsheet alone.

Of those, there are 78 Louisville, Kentucky tokens ranging from a minimum value of $0.25 to a maximum value of $500.00. Each Louisville, Kentucky token is uniquely identified by KY510++ where ++ is a one or two-letter unique combination.

But, we need the appropriate volume of the actual catalog to identify the above pictured school ticket’s correct KY510++ label to pinpoint its value in the Atwood-Coffee Catalog.

Regardless, this token was a fun find. Plus, we learned about exonumists and vecturists.

You just never know where that “learn something new every day” will take you.