Mighty Bargain Hunter

Collectible elongated coins

March 13th, 2006 | by mbhunter |

When I was still in elementary school, I remember a day when a passenger train was coming into town. There hadn’t been a passenger train in town for a long time, so this was a big event.

Prior to the train’s arrival I put a penny on the railroad tracks. The train arrived, and the wheels of the train ran over the penny. After the train had come in, I retrieved it, and it was an oval shape and otherwise unrecognizable as a penny.

In other places (museums, amusement parks, turnpike rest stops, etc.) for fifty-one cents (two quarters plus the penny) you can change your change into a small oval-shaped medallion with a picture of something on it by turning a crank that works a press to flatten and imprint the penny.

In my travels, I ran across Penny Squishing, a blog that records an elongated coin collector’s activities. This is a sub-area of collecting exonumia, which consists of tokens and other objects that are used in place of money. She has elongated coins with baseball players, Einstein, water fowl, and lots of others. It has fairly broad interest, as there are currently a couple thousand auctions for elongated coins on eBay.

Neat stuff!

Questions tagged credit-card at Cash Commons:

• Anybody have sucesss with 0% Balance Transfers on Credit Cards?
• When entering credit card information on a website, does the billing address have to be correct?
• Two of my credit cards got hit with fraudulent charges the same day. What gives?