Faux Victorian Train Tickets

Not too long ago, my son asked for some fake train tickets, for use with his toy trains and his various make-believe train tours of our house and neighborhood.

Fair enough! Who wouldn’t want some fake train tickets?

I looked online for something cool to print out, and to my surprise found mostly party invitations and simplistic Thomas-themed items, with nothing much for a conductor to punch.

I decided something more realistic and old-timey would be more fun…for me, if not for him. Thus was born Confabulated Railways, a made-up rail empire, circa 1886. Or at least, thus was born this printable page of their Central Line tickets. Fun for kids who love trains, but classy enough for Steampunk and LARP use too.

Confabulated Railways Tickets

(Click for full size printable page.)

These faux Victorian train tickets are sized to print on 10-per-page perforated business card stock, but you can also print them on plain paper and cut them out. (Printers vary. If you use perforated stock, you may need to adjust the print scale or margins. First print a test sheet on plain paper, place this behind a blank sheet of perf stock, and hold both up in front of a strong light to preview whether the cards fall within the perforations.)

As the conductor, you can use a pen or a hole punch to mark various items around a ticket’s perimeter: origin and destination stations, date, time, price paid. (However, I’ve found that a standard hole punch’s 1/4″ holes are kind of big for some of these marks. A scrapbooking 1/8″ hole punch or a real conductor’s punch will work better, but these tools can be hard to find.)

You are welcome to print as many copies as you like for your own use. (But please link back here rather than selling printouts or hosting copies of these files. Thank you.)