Arrangement for feeding valuable papers into a storage space

Claim 1

An arrangement for infeeding rectangular, elongate documents each having two opposite long sides and two opposite short sides, such as banknotes and cheques, from an externally accessible infeed opening (61) to a document storage space (26,27), comprising: detecting means disposed in proximity to a transport path extending between the infeed opening and the document storage space for detecting and examining documents passing sequentially in series along the transport path and for controlling the transportation of the documents within the arrangement; and a plurality of mutually separated storage locations arranged within the storage space and each provided with an individual infeed means (260,270), the infeed means of all of the storage locations together forming a part of said transport path, said arrangement comprising two mutually spaced parts, one of said parts (11 . . . 133) including the infeed opening, the detecting means (121) and a portion of the transport path for transporting the documents in the direction of longitudinal axes thereof with a short side first, and another of said parts (201-2705) including the storage locations (26,27), which are of modular construction and incorporate cassettes, and the remainder of the transport path for transporting the documents in the direction of transverse axes thereof with a long side first; the portion of the transport path in said one part (11 . . . 133) incorporating a measuring device (16) for establishing the length of a document in the transport direction, and therewith the location of its mid-point, and further incorporating, downstream of the detecting means (121) and the measuring device (16), a gripping means (23) arranged to grip a respective document for transfer thereof from the transport path in said one part to the transport path in said other part in response to outputs from the detecting means (121) and the measuring device (16) such that, when transferring documents of mutually different lengths, the gripping means (23) effects said transfers at points in time when the mid-points of the documents are located at a predetermined position on the transport path.