On Thu, 04 Dec 2003 17:32:21 GMT, "Orienteer"
wrote:

Can anyone help answer a query from a friend in Japan?

He's trying to find information about when magnetic stripe tickets were
first used, and heard that LT had some in the 1960s. Were there experiments
before the current ones were introduced (1980s if I recall correctly)?


Like others in this thread, I'm sure it was about the time of the
Victoria Line opening in the late 1960s. This was very much a
production system, not just an experiment.

Again as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the whole of the back of
the ticket was a magnetic surface. However these tickets were much
smaller than the current tube tickets. The front of these tickets was
yellow to make them distinctive to passengers, so those with yellow
tickets could go through the automatic gates while those with other
tickets had to show them at a barrier

Martin