How did the storage lockers at bus depots etc. work?

[TokyoBayer]

@purplehorseshoe

I’m picturing a bunch of people who’ve forgotten which locker has their stuff, and are now just wandering at random waving their card around hopefully. (Kinda like folks who are never me roaming the parking lot and pushing their key fob buttons high above their heads.)

There is a central controller with the scanner. It tells you which is your locker.

[StarvingButStrong]

@abel29a

I used to monitor such lockers back in the day - pre-digitalisation the customer would insert the number of coins required for one 24 hrs (i think) period, lock the locker, remove the key. If they opened the locker prior to the 24hrs had passed the money was lost. Each morning we’d go by the lockers with a list, making a note of all lockers in use. There was a counter on each locker counting up the number of times it had been used (this was a mechanical counter triggered by the action of turning the key), we’d write down the counter number on a list of all the lockers. If a locker was registered with the same counternumber two days in a row we would disable the lock (requiring us to go out there with a master key to open the locker). Any customer overstaying the 24hrs (or so) time line would have to talk with us, we would then check how many days the locker had been overdue and charge the amount before opening the locker with the master key.

Oh, excellent info, thank you!

(Isn’t it wonderful how there seems to be someone with the inside info about ANYTHING on the Dope?)

[Filbert]

The station I used to get the train home from school from had them. One of the other kids who got that train could give ya inside information…

It wasn’t me that talked him into getting in an empty one, it also wasn’t me that somehow managed to lock the door with both kid and key inside, I was just one of the giggling onlookers to the station master yelling at the bunch of sheepish boys after the master key was produced and the kid extracted.

[homeskillet]

Last time I used one was at Islands of Adventure Universal Orlando in May 2005.
They had banks of lockers with a central interface that required a PIN in lieu of a key.
I seem to recall them being free but could be mistaken. I also don’t recall a time limit other than you had to take your items before closing time. We stayed until the park closed and when we arrived back at the lockers all the doors were open and our items were on the ground. I guess some rapscallion was going through the now open lockers and decided our stuff wasn’t worth stealing.

This was during “Gay Days” where you’re encouraged to wear a red top preferably that says where you’re from on it. Also at the lockers was a young couple with their kid who was probably all of five years old putting on a red sweatshirt they had stowed. To their own amusing they teased the kid saying “you know we love you no matter who you are!” It was an epic whoosh!

[aldiboronti]

@bob_2

We used to have them at stations over here too. They came in different sizes and big ones cost more. As I recall, one paid for 24 hours and after that, they could be opened by the staff. In practice, they tended not to be over rigorous, especially if there were plenty of unused ones.

And before the lockers you had an actual Left Luggage office in stations where you could leave suitcases,trunks, etc and be given a ticket for retrieval (can’t recall the time limit but I think it was pretty extensive.) Sometimes the trunk would contain a torso, as in a famous Brighton incident in the 30s or 40s.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

Apparently they still have the lockers at San Diego International. I was stuck in DTSD for a couple of hours one time, and ended up having brought way too many layers of clothing for how the weather turned out. So I thought I could get a locker at the train station and store my heavy coat, especially as I was going to be taking a train from there later on. They told me there were no lockers, but I could take a shuttle to the airport and use one there. Granted, San Diego’s airport is itself practically downtown so it wasn’t quite as preposterous as it would be in most places, but I was still surprised by the whole thing.

Come to think of it, the local commuter trains (both San Diego and L.A.) have no overhead luggage racks, yet the Sprinter trains that run between Oceanside and Escondido do.

[kaylasdad99]

They have two different sizes in the locker rooms at Disneyland, and they rent for $7.00 and $10.00 per day (last time I used one, the big ones were $5.00 per day).

[carlb]

We used the modern day version at an airport somewhere within the last few years (I can’t remember which airport; somewhere in Europe). We had a couple of large bags we didn’t need while we went off somewhere else for a couple of days. Stored the bags in the locker, swiped a credit card, and indicated the length of time we were storing. I can’t remember how we opened the locker when we returned; I feel like we created a PIN (or maybe the locker generated one) that had to be keyed in.