A USED railway ticket for a seven-mile journey from Poole to Wimborne has just been sold for a staggering £2,352.

The second class single was issued in 1863 and has been snap-ped up by a railway enthusiast at an auction in Wiltshire.

Auctioneers had estimated the ticket would fetch about £100 but it was bought for more than 23 times the forecast fee by a collector in Kent.

And it's believed that its £2,000 plus price could beat the previous record for a used railway ticket - sold for £1,500 at an auction two years ago.

"I believe the Dorset ticket is a new world record," said auction-eer Chris Albury from Dominic Winter, which arranged its sale.

"Railway ticket collecting is a close knit and competitive community, and the auction room was full of collectors all bidding against each other.

"That's why its price rocketed. Normally we have commission bids from people on telephones. That didn't happen this time.

"No-one wanted to risk it over the phone and were all there in person."

The person using the 1863 ticket wouldn't have got on the train at the Poole station we know of.

Opened in 1847 as the town's first railway station, it was in fact on the Hamworthy side of Poole Bridge.

Some 25 years later the line was opened from Broadstone Junction into the centre of the town, creating the current Poole station.

In 1872 the old Poole station was then renamed Hamworthy and has remained as such to the present day.

The seller of the ticket was the widow of a railway fanatic who had given 50 tickets to the auction, which sold for a total of £15,000.

"Old train tickets are big business," said Mr Albury.