From 10 minutes to 3 seconds

"Twenty years ago, when I first came to work in the railway department, I sold tickets at the ticket window. At that time, train tickets were made of cardboard The conductor needs to write down the passenger's departure station and terminal station on the ticket. Different fares need to be calculated by mileage, and now it takes dozens of times to sell a ticket. " Ms. Zhang, who just retired from the railway system, recalled. She deeply remembers the scene of manual ticket sales: all cardboard tickets were placed on a shelf divided into several squares according to different stations. If a passenger wants to buy a ticket from Beijing to Xining, the conductor must find the ticket from Xining on the shelf, stamp it with steel seal and date. If the passenger buys a ticket at a station that exceeds the pre-prepared arrival, the conductor must manually calculate the validity period and price of the ticket according to different information such as mileage, fare, time, stop, adult ticket, child ticket and disability ticket. Without professional training, it is impossible to complete such a complicated calculation.

"At that time, the conductor sold a ticket, which was two or three minutes fast and about 10 minutes slow. At the end of the day, not many tickets were sold. " Ms. Zhang said. Due to the lack of communication between the national ticketing systems at that time, in order to ensure that there would be no repeat ticketing, the number of tickets in various places was limited, and long-distance passengers often lined up at the ticket office with dry food and bedding.

Because the early manual ticketing method was highly dependent on labor, and the manual operation was extremely time-consuming, the ticketing speed and settlement speed were slow, the time for passengers to purchase tickets was long, and the procedures were extremely complicated. Until the electronic ticket appeared, replacing the old cardboard ticket, the train ticket information was networked nationwide, which greatly simplified the purchase of train tickets. Through the current national network system of train tickets, it only takes 3 seconds to print a ticket at any ticket window or booking point, which is more than 10 times faster than the speed in the era of manual ticket sales.

"We used to sell a ticket, but now we can sell dozens. However, the number of passengers traveling by train now is much higher than that of 20 years ago. To fundamentally solve the problem of difficulty in buying tickets, we must start with improving railway capacity. " Ms. Zhang said with deep feelings.

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