50 Centimes Régie des Chemins de Fer en Territoires Occupés

The RCFTO was the Allied-administered railway authority that managed the German rail network in the occupied Rhineland following the Armistice — not a bank, not a treasury, but a transit bureaucracy that nonetheless issued its own fractional scrip because small-denomination coinage was chronically short in the occupation zone. These notes circulated among railway staff and, by necessity, spilled into general local use.

De Ruaz's engraving work is precise for a note of this size — Imprimerie Paul Dupont had a long track record with French government printing contracts, and the quality shows. Vergnot's design credit on occupation-era railway scrip is an unusual pairing of professional artistic talent with deeply mundane administrative necessity.