Ticket to Ride

On where the song title came from:

An obvious explanation is that it refers to a train ticket...but Don Short, a British newspaper journalist who traveled with the Beatles, claimed it dated back to the days in the red-light district of Hamburg, Germany. "The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health, and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn't have a dose of anything," he said. "John (Lennon) told me he coined the phrase 'a ticket to ride' to describe those cards." McCartney had a more innocent explanation: He said that it was a play on the name of the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. One other possibility: On the day the Beatles recorded "Ticket to Ride," Lennon passed his driver's test.

~ From the Rolling Stone publication The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs