First, the years for which I kept my tickets: 👻 This link is deader than Flash Player. of my CD tickets and seat reservations bought in person. It shows that I am choosing from 319 travel documents, although in 2010 and 2011 things were not exactly booming for the railways with me, just 12 tickets in total. Let’s go have a look at the photos. I only have the ones up to 2012 because I had filed them away somewhere and forgot about them, otherwise they would probably have ended up in the bin – though even so, there would not have been a staggering number of them.
I will just point out that it often depended on the ticket office and what paper and printer it had; conductors have probably had the same POP device for years, only the paper changes. I am not sure whether they had a code reader before codes started being printed on tickets, but visually I think they did. I am happy to be corrected. I always mention only the first month in which I noticed a change, otherwise there would be much more here, in the style of “A, then came B, a month later A, and before we knew it there was B again” and so on. It also follows that when I write a “definitive” conclusion that something started being used, it does not mean that the others vanished off the face of the earth at that very moment. In March 2010 I bought only 3 tickets, one in Navsi and 2 in Cesky Tesin. The one from Navsi also has holes on the side, the vertical text on the left “The journey must begin on the first day of validity”, and it lacks the pictogram of a locomotive and a carriage next to Persons and Class. I will not mention them again, their occurrence went up and down like a sine wave.
The next ones are 3 tickets from April 2011. They gained a wavy line filled with a background similar to the one on banknotes, those small inconspicuous patterns in a single color that people probably hardly notice. There was also a large white circle in the lower right part. In July, at the same ticket office in Cesky Tesin, the wavy line disappeared again, and so did the white circle.
In August, in the year of our Lord 2011, I bought a ticket on the train for the first time. I have no idea what I was doing in Dobratice pod Prasivou back then or why I was going to Frydek-Mistek; it is the first of its kind, so I have nothing to compare it with. As for the station tickets, they looked the same as in March again.
January 2012 was once again marked by a mix of tradition and novelty. The ticket had everything, only the punched holes on the sides and the obligation to begin the journey on the first day were dropped. One brand new feature did appear, though: the CD logo was sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, whereas before it had always swelled with pride in its rightful place. In February the logo settled permanently where it had been for as long as I can remember.
In June 2012 came a change of paper for the POP devices, which better matched the corporate color – that is, sky blue. The arrows were borrowed from the counter tickets.
When the last cherries fell in July 2012, a fairly radical innovation arrived. The orientation was no longer landscape, and the biggest visual change was in the code. It serves two purposes. The first is protection against counterfeiting; I have not looked into it yet, but I guess it is something only CD has and it is managed internally. At the bottom there was an embossed steam locomotive; you probably cannot make it out in the photo, but maybe I will take a picture of another ticket.
The second reason was passenger comfort during inspection – a similar code is used on e-shop tickets, so you do not need to dictate a 6-character code to the conductor or show the ticket, you just let the POP device scanner decode it automatically. Conductors got new printers and also printed different-looking tickets. But more on that in December. In theory you could take a photo of the code and then just show the photo if you lost your ticket, but let’s be honest, who would do that? 😀 The printers were replaced gradually; in Cesky Tesin they only had their premiere in September.
In the twelfth month of 2012, the look of the POP device tickets changed completely. I had never been dissatisfied, but I liked this a lot. The whole thing felt elegant, from the paper and its fine texture to the colors, dominated by light blue. This is also where I saw the graphic code for the first time.
March 2013 added the address of CD and its VAT number to the tickets from conductors – probably for tax reasons. Everything else remained untouched.
In the first month of love (May), the header changed, and the address and VAT number were no longer so crammed together.
Starting in July 2013, the lower left corner no longer read “Ceske Drahy, a.s.”, but “CD a.s., VAT No.: CZ70994226“. In September they also added the address below it.
In November 2013, the paper background changed for tickets printed on the train. It is my first ticket of this kind and it is quite faded. The orange color disappeared, leaving only white, black or pale blue. The vertical code was then gray. I like that it was not spartan / austere at all; the little squares were the same size as all the others on the ticket. Perhaps it affected some people’s perception a little subliminally.
December brought a gift in the form of the CD headquarters address on counter tickets.
Tickets printed at the station from March 2014 largely copied the ones from conductors; it was finally unified. The designer just moved the blue series of pictures to the right side, because the left side already had the logo in the same color, including the text Ceske Drahy, in a full-width white strip. There was also an “embroidered” silhouette of a steam locomotive. Compared to the older ones, the carrier’s address and VAT number were missing again.
In March 2015, station tickets started appearing with a random thin blue line on the right and a slightly different font in the upper right. Instead of the steam locomotive silhouette, there was suddenly what seems to be a Shinkansen. The same went for tickets bought from a conductor, only the line was on the left.
The only thing I miss on the new portrait-oriented tickets are the ads on the back.
I also wanted to find the stamp from the time I was checked by a ticket inspector instead of a regular conductor. He was dressed in plain clothes, and there was not just one of them but 3 at once, all showing a CD ID card. Their stamp was not blue, purple or black like the conductors’ stamps, but red, and it also carried the text “R E V I Z O R” (inspector). To finish, a little joke – even when everything else passes away, the logo and the whole of Ceske Drahy will endure. With a bit of humor, you could say it is a cheaper version of the IN100 🙂
I wonder what degree of madness it takes for someone to analyze every change in tickets over time. I probably should not publish this, but my heart will not let me hold back. It is one of the plans I have been carrying around in my head for years – and only now am I getting around to making it all happen. I hope we enjoyed the trip, and see you on the trains of Ceske Drahy 🙂