You know you're getting old when......

.......... you remember these machines in use.



There was one outside Bray Railway Station when I was growing up in the early 1960's. Even then they were ancient as I have seen photographs of them outside stations at the advent of the 20th century.

They were a source of fascination to us kids and I can remember badgering older relatives to give me an old penny (!) to print-out my name on a small strip of metal.

I often wondered what had happened to the machines and, years later (late 1990s), I met a man who had worked for the British Automatic Machine Company who put me in the picture; he said the company had maintained meticulous records and when the decision to get rid of the machines was made, he had the job of contacting all the stations concerned to consign their machines to Hammond Lane in Dublin by the earliest suitable train. The one pictured above turned up at a sale in England a couple of years and no doubt fetched a tidy sum.