Great Western Coffee Shop

Four revenue protection officers  on the platform at St Austell today and ticket checks on trains  as well after every station stop. Interesting to know how much they collected. Aimed at departing students? Or just a pre Christmas purge, given there are few ticket barriers in Kernow.

Connwall?
Ironically apt........  ;)

A couple of times a year, I encounter a group of seven or eight RPOs at Tilehurst in the afternoons. An initial reaction is that's a lot of people for the small number of passengers during the day, even allowing for up and down trains arriving within two or three minutes of each other. But a bit later on the trains do get busier, especially with school-children and then commuters returning from Reading.

I explain that I have no ticket but am seeing a friend off and they've always accepted that and allowed me on to the platform. I make a point of thanking them on my way back. ("See, you were right to trust me."  :D)

BTW I've wondered whether at least one of the group is a police officer, as I understand RPOs have no power of arrest...

The annual Rock Festival is one occasion when one can expect to see RPOs at Tilehurst as the station is within walking distance of camping-sites. I once saw a large rucksack tossed over the fence on Platform 4, followed by its owner, who'd presumably walked along the Thames tow-path and clambered up the bank before climbing over the railings. (Time was when access onto the platform from the tow-path was facilitated by a path and a gate with a penny-in-the-slot lock. Forty-five years ago, the lock had been painted solid and the gate disappeared during recent modifications.)

Marlburian

Disappeared?

So did the pennies - finding one from the 1840's was always nice. Young Victoria's head rubbed almost smooth.

[pedant mode]
Unlike today when they change the shape, size and the material content of notes and coins every five minutes (or so it seems), pre-decimalisation coins remained unchanged since the last "upgrade" in 1860, with the exception of the gradual reduction in the silver content of "silver" coins (and, if you want to be really really pedantic, the demise of the guinea).

But 1860 is the important year. If you had found any pennies from the 1840s lyng around then they would have been down there since 1859!

[/pedant mode]

Completely off tangent, I well remember you could still find pennies from back to the 1890s in circulation in the run up to Decimalisation in 1971.  I had one from most years from 1896 to the last ones in 1967 in a Huckleberry Hound piggybank.  17/6 - that was a lot of money to a (ahem) eight year old!

Not forgetting the 1912 1918 and 1919 half pennys and pennys with KN and H on them.