Museum: €25k reward for oldest train ticket

The Railway Museum in Utrecht has offered a reward of €25,000 for the oldest train ticket in the Netherlands. The ticket is thought to be a one-way ticket from Amsterdam to Harlem on the country's first railway, and dated September 1839.

Museum curators are searching in earnest for the ticket, spurred by next week's elimination of paper train tickets on the Dutch rail system. The museum would like to obtain the 170-year-old ticket as a prized piece in their ticket collection.

A spokesperson for the museum told reporters that the monetary reward is an indication of the historical value of the ticket, calling it the “Rembrandt of our Railway.”

Curators do not know if the ticket is still in existence. "We know that 77,000 tickets were issued in 1839. We hope that one of them has been retained,” the spokesperson said.

In 1939, replicas of the first ticket issued were designed in celebration of 100 years of railways. Curators say that this complicates the search for the oldest ticket, as it is difficult to distinguish the replicas from the original.