‘Rail Settlement Plan’; based on ‘signature cancellations’ by rail ticket inspectors. Drawings (four images).
‘Rail Settlement Plan’
The greenish background of all UK rail tickets is made up of the repeated words “Rail Settlement Plan”. In 2013, the railway started migrating to new ticket stock, which uses the words ‘National Rail’ instead. So if I had collected these tickets one year later, this work would have had a different title and perhaps the personalised cancellation practice used by ticket collectors might have stopped also – in which case there would have been no work at all. So this work celebrates the little ballpoint ‘cancellations’ made by ticket collectors on rail tickets on the daily commute to work. Attempting to capture the practiced economy of these graphic flourishes I tried to emulate them at the larger scale by squirting ink from a syringe.
Rail Settlement Plan (RSP) is a division of the Rail Delivery Group in the United Kingdom. It provides a wide range of common services to the UK’s train operating companies and third party providers of information and retail services.