Quickly buy a ticket ... and then hop onto the train! To do this, many people stand in front of a Scheidt & Bachmann ticket machine every day. The company from Mönchengladbach is a specialist in fare management systems. It developed the first ticket machine for public transport in the late 1970s. But the engineers still had to invest a lot of work to win the Deutsche Bahn contract they longed for. This was because the required dot-matrix printer and the handling of banknotes took up a lot of space. Yet Deutsche Bahn wanted the ticket machines to be compact as well. In addition, an intermediate cash box was required. This was to ensure that if the customer cancelled the purchase the machine would only return the coins they had inserted and no other coins from the change dispenser – an important measure to combat money laundering at ticket machines. The Scheidt & Bachmann team created a practical solution for this.
Intermediate cash box: the first European patent
The engineers also developed a self-filling change dispenser that replenished automatically using deposited coins. This way, even if many customers paid with banknotes, there were plenty of coins left over for change. The machine also featured a solid-state drive installed in the coin cassette, which stored copies of the sales statistics. This technology enabled IT- assisted accounting for and management of ticket machine sales for the first time.
The ticket machine set many other processes and designs in motion, which Scheidt & Bachmann had protected by patents. In 1980, the company was granted the patent for the intermediate cash box. It was the first European patent ever granted. Deutsche Bahn was impressed by the invention – and awarded the contract. Today, Scheidt & Bachmann offers digital solutions for the mobility sector around the world.
(Header: Wellnhofer Designs – AdobeStock , in the article: Scheidt & Bachmann)
