Metcard - Employee Touchcards

Page last modified/checked: Sunday, 28th March, 2010

At last Touchcards have come into more visible and widespread use from July 1st 2000, when they were issued to all employees who are entitled to free travel within the three zone fare system. However, it must be stressed, the Touchcard is NOT a replacement for the actual employees free travel authority. Rather, it is to be used to activate automatic fare gates and placed within 70mm of the yellow target area on validators when the employee travels on metropolitan services. In effect, employees are being used to "live test" Touchcards before they come into public circulation. These cards are approximately 1.5mm thick, and are manufactured in Switzerland. They were encoded by Sydney based company "Cardserv".

Interestingly, the instruction sheet puts the cost of a replacement card at $25.00. Even if an administrative fee is part of this, it still proves that Tochcards are expensive to produce.

By mid-2006, the supply of employee touchcards had been exhausted and it was not intended to produce any more. Metcard style yearly access passes were supplied from this time and these are described and illustrated in the "related AFC enabled tickets" section. During August 2008 all reamining employee touchcards were recalled in favour of the yearly access pass. Customer service employees at barrier gated stations retained their touchcards to allow them to continue to instantly open barrier gates as necessary. By February 2010, these remaining touchcards had been replaced by myki smartcards as the barriers had now been modified to accept these and the small number of myki cards that were in use by the general public.

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