197911 – Stanley – Eastern Suburbs Railway – Part 3: Automatic Fare Collection

The possible use of an Automatic Fare Collection System (A.F.C.S.) on the Eastern Suburbs Railway was first suggested in 1973 and a tentative Specification for equipment was proposed. However, a definite decision to introduce A.F.C. was not made until early 1977, and a new Specification had to be written.

The system required was to be able to dispense and verify the common types of daily and periodical tickets in use on the N.S.W. suburban system and was to provide for through ticketing for railbus services. It was also to be a pilot system for the possible later introduction of A.F.C. into the Sydney Metropolitan area generally, as on a cost/benefit basis alone its use on the Eastern Suburbs Railway could not be justified. The system could not generate significant staff savings on E.S.R. stations because of the large volume of passengers entering from the metropolitan stations whose tickets would have to be manually collected.

A Committee, comprising members of each of the directly involved Branches under the Chairmanship of the Project Manager, E.S.R., was set up to co-ordinate the production of the new specification and subsequently to assist the Signals and Communications Branch in assessing Tenders and in discussion with the Contractor.

As this was to be the first A.F.C. system to be installed by the Commission and there was no previous in-house experience to draw upon, the Specification prepared was necessarily of a somewhat general nature and aside from outlining the purpose of the machines required, left Tenderers free to put forward their own proposals for the most suitable system.

The Specification was circulated world wide to known suppliers of A.F.C. equipment as well being advertised in the local press and in trade publications. Although approximately twenty five companies showed interest only seven Tenders were received, representing British, European, Japanese and American Companies.

After detailed examination of Tenders the Contract was awarded to Cubic Western Data (C.W.D.) of San Diego, California with A.T.L. Ltd. as Australian associate. The Contract provided for the supply, installation and one (1) years maintenance of 8 Booking Office machines (B.O.M.), 31 Ticket issuing (vending) machines (T.I.M.), Contract to 15 B.O.M., 2 ticket encoding machines (T.E.M.), and 45 turnstile type barriers. Provision of a ticket dispenser for use on buses was also included.

These numbers were subsequently increased during the course of the contract to 15 B.O.M., 32 T.I.M. and 55 barriers to provide for greater back-up facilities in the event of equipment failure.

Some nine months after the Contract was let it became evident that, at least in 1978,79, it was not going to be possible to provide for the sale of encoded tickets on bus services. No suitably reliable machine could be produced to encode the ticket at the point of issue, i.e. on the bus and this coupled with the reluctance of bus crews to sell pre-encoded tickets from a dispenser has meant that no outlets are available for the sale of encoded tickets at the commencement of inward journeys. A visually identifiable paper ticket for bus/rail journeys into the City is sold by bus crews but this, of course cannot be used in automatic barriers and tends to reduce the effectiveness of the A.F.C. system. Combined encoded tickets are available from E.S.R. railway stations.