The barrier arrangement shown above was included to show a working installation. This was the Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) service between Philadelphia and Lindenwold Southern New Jersey which opened in January 1969. This was the world's first fully automated rapid rail service and utilized an automatic fare collection system inside unattended stations based on the progress made by Cubic Western Data Inc during the mid-1960's, but using ticket vending machines that PATCO designed and built themselves. The turnstile barriers were known as the "milk stool" type incorporating three rotating arms, the type of which had long been in use for mass entry and exit usually by insertion of a token. The difference here was that they were activated by inserting magnetically encoded tickets developed by Cubic and already in use on the Illinois Central Railroad through south Chicago since 1966. Unlike the IC tickets, the PATCO tickets were captured by the barriers and could be re-encoded and re-used up to 200 times. |