Has anyone ever seen one of these before? I know it's probably worthless, but I'd like to know more about it. Are these still being used today? When did they make these? Here are pictures Thanks!
Long Beach, CA. Issued 1948, White Metal, 12 varieties known but not described/pictured. Catalog .25 in 1996.
It's CA 445C. It's common but not distressingly common. You won't get this one when you order 20 different in the classified ads. It will rarely be included in 100 different. Mintage is reported as in two groups of 100,000 and 400,000. Most of these were apparently lost or destroyed.
If you are still interested in the long beach bus token, please e-mail . I'm using my phone right now. Kk, address is [e-mail address removed, spam protection - use PM/Conversation instead]. Thank You!!
View attachment 1461925 View attachment 1461923 Hi there, I also have some of these tokens and don’t know much about them either. Here are my pics of them. View attachment 1461923 View attachment 1461924
Rollhunter, Your exact token id is CA 445-Ci. The information cladking provided is from The Atwood-Coffee Catalogue of United States and Canadian Transportation Tokens. There are 3 volumes at various edition levels. The first volume describes metal, size, and description that allows one to determine the identification number, the number of varieties, the year issued and the value at time of printing. Volume 2 is a history and encyclopedia of the tokens. Pacific Electric has the first bus lines in Long Beach. Lang Transportation took them over on 1/9/40. Long Beach Lines bought Lang in 6/46. For your design of token, 400,000 were struck 9/47 and 100,000 were struck 10/59. Long Beach Lines was taken over by Long Beach Public Transportation Co. on 9/1/63, so I imagine that date or shortly after was the end of their use. Volume 3 enables one to determine identity of the varieties. My set of the 3 volumes have 2565 pages.
cw, great, comprehensive reply with excellent info. But just so you know, you probably will not get a response from Rollhunter, since he posted this thread on July 22, 2009, & hasn't been seen here since Dec. 17, 2011. But the rest of us appreciate your info! I love red meat!
