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When Karl Parn first started collecting TTC tickets, a single adult fare cost just 12.5 cents, children qualified for reduced fares based on their height not their age and there was no such thing as a Metropass.

Forty years later, the fares have increased more than twentyfold, age is now the only discount qualifier, those handy plastic swipe cards are becoming the norm, and Parn's collection has grown from the double into the quadruple digits.

"As a kid, I didn't have much money and these were pretty much free," he said, pointing to ten binders full of transit tickets numbering in the thousands and dating back to late 19th century. "My first bunch I picked up in an antique store in Kingston. I got 30 or 40 tickets from the 20s and 30s in a shop downtown in the early 1970s and that was my main starting point."

Green, orange, yellow, red, blue; 10 cents, 12.5 cents, five for $2; Toronto Railway Company, West Toronto Jitney Association, Toronto Transportation Commission: every colour, every price, every incarnation of what is now the TTC, Parn has a ticket for almost every one of them. And then some.

But soon his collection, at least as far as adult tickets are concerned, will become a discontinued commodity. The TTC will phase out the sale of the adult paper fare (student and senior tickets will remain) in favor of the token and Metropass as of Sept. 6 and stop accepting them as fare as of Sept. 29.

"They're stopping tickets because it's too easy for people to just photocopy them. It's becoming very awkward for the TTC to try to prevent people from producing fakes," Parn lamented. "I'm not out of business yet, but things are definitely changing."

And his collection has changed right along with the times. In the last binder of a collection organized chronologically, Parn has plastic slip cover sleeves full of colourful Metropasses dating back to 1993 - a different colour for each week, each month, a new design every year. There are special issue passes for Caribana and for the CNE. There are children's passes and seniors' passes. There are passes purchased through the mail and those bought at the ticket counter - so many varieties of passes, in fact, that Parn has a difficult time keeping up.

"If you look back on the early days," he said, pulling out some his more vintage fares, "these three pages represent 30 years of history. But now if you wanted to do that over 30 years, you'd have to have book and books. The fares go up so often and the tickets change so much..."

If not for his friends and kindly TTC ticket collectors down at nearby Islington and Kipling stations, Parn might have spent a fortune in the face of those ever increasing fares.

"At one time I could go down at the first of the month and get 50 used passes from the ticket collectors because the old ones were of no value anymore," he said. "I'd get them from people handing them in, otherwise it would have become a very expensive hobby."

For the older tickets among his collection, Parn has gone "here, there, everywhere" in an effort to track down elusive tickets. Some he's picked up at random antique stores, others he's found online. His last batch, which sits scattered on a tray waiting to be organized, was purchased from a travelling antique dealer at Sherway Gardens.

"I asked the guy for years and years about tickets, and this year he finally remembered," Parn said with a laugh while sifting through his newest finds. "There's all kinds of interesting things here - a lot of stuff people wouldn't know about if they didn't know who to ask."

The problem with that is, the people who once knew all about the tickets, who used the tickets, simply aren't around anymore, Parn said.

"It would be interesting to make an attempt at filling the gaps, but there's an awful lot of gaps," he said, noting he's only ever come across two other collectors as avid as he is.

"But I'm still going to keep on trying to get that old stuff. I know there's some old tickets from 1880s I don't have, but those might be beyond my reach," he added. "Hopefully there will be a few more that'll turn up - but there's still the rest of Canada to collect."