Take the Snail Train...

Up early in time to catch the 0639 train from Inverurie for another meeting in Edinburgh.

Now, when I was a lad, ticket inspectors were equipped with 'standard issue' BR ticket punches to clip the tickets they inspected.

Nowadays on the Scotrail system, these appear to have been replaced (as some sort of economy measure no doubt) by cheap felt pens, which the 'Conductors' (as they are now called) use to 'autograph' the tickets they have seen.

This indeed happened yesterday on the first stage of my journey, from Inverurie into Aberdeen.

The Conductor who joined us at Aberdeen, however, was evidently having none of this. As he approached along the train corridor, I could see that he at least was still clipping tickets in the old-fashioned way.

Not so old-fashioned, though, as it turned out: as he handed me back my ticket I was intrigued by the shape he had punched out. It was the cheery outline of a snail!

I guess he'd bought the punch on his own initiative as a novelty item in some stationery store.

I thought of keeping the ticket as a souvenir, but then I remembered it was destined to be swallowed by the automatic ticket gates at Haymarket.

So I photographed it instead, on the table right in front of me, using the back of my mobile phone to add contrast.