Riding the rails

On NJ transit the conductors are much like many metropolitan train conductors I imagine. The one interesting thing is that they have pads of paper and hole punches. They seem to do strange things with these. For instance this morning a young lady was paying for her ticket with cash. I was too distant to hear the interchange with them, however after she handed him a 5 dollar bill he reached into his pockets and produced a pad of pink pages. He took his mighty hole punch and punched 9 very specific holes on the paper before handing it to the young lady, I think he retained a copy of the punches but I cannot be sure. When he came to me I handed him my ticket (a piece of paper with printing on it) and in exchange he handed me another piece of paper with printing on it. This paper had the numbers 2-23 printed on it. At some point further in the journey he came and took this paper from me. Odd.