Back when the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company expanded and renamed themselves International Business Machines their bread and butter was automated card reading and managing, but I know the manual card reading process (with rods and trays) continued, amazingly, into the 1950s at least (I had professors who had used those techniques as grad students).
Hollerith, however, already had electrical (I hesitate to say "electronic:) card reading in the 19th century (Hollerith was one of the progenitors of CTR by the way.). All those cool optimizations like mercury-bath readers, vacuum columns for tapes etc were simply expensive performance optimizations of tasks previously done mechanically, only viable for people with huge datasets.
By the 1940s the Bell long distance area code routing tables were stored as sets of metal punch cards the size of North American automobile license plates. As they were metal (they were read a lot) they were presumably read mechanically though I haven't ever seen the apparatus. Yes, they updated the routing tables by sending huge crates of metal tablets to each toll office.
Whippersnappers might not remember the ubiquity of punch cards (actually I don't remember either, and I'm the oldest of the genXers), but apparently you got one with your bills, like utilities and charge card bills, so they could assign payment to the correct account. I do remember highway tolls being collected by issuing a punch card upon entry to the turnpike and then having the toll collector use that to calculate the toll due when you exited. Apparently the phrase "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" was a commonly used tagline for jokes about the computerization of society as all theses cards bore that legend.