Nevada Gaming permits slot machine gaming at taverns, bars, gas stations, grocery stores and many other local "convenience" places of business. In doing so, they restrict the number of allowed machines. I don't know the specific numbers, but we are talking between 6 and 15. With such a few number of machines, the complexity of licensing, having a cashier, a repair workforce and all the requisite infrastructure to support slot machine operations, Gaming will license a "Route" company to own the machines (providing all the maintenance, cashier and payout services) while the route company makes deals with the physical location to place the machines.

Accordingly, and this is pre-TITO, the slot machine tokens were required to have the route company denoted on one side and the physical location on the other. Those tokens are called "route" tokens.

Here is an example:

The "route" company is/was Templeton Gaming Corp. and the physical location was Long's Drug store on Rainbow, Las Vegas, NV. Long's is no in business (they were bought-out) and I don't know if Templeton is still a route company, but there are several route companys in business today. Some have TITO's, but quite a few require the player to call the cashier over to get a payout and if over a certain amount, the cashier needs to call the route company to dispatch a mobile unit to make the payout!)

I hope this helps.