China has developed an all-in-one train ticketing system that can unite the widely different sales platforms in more than 140 countries on a smartphone app. The system has been tailor-made for member countries of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and will automatically access and coordinate their ticket selling platforms. Laos is the first country to sign up to the platform, with travelers using their smartphones to book tickets from March 15. The China-based servers can handle requests from passengers around the world in different languages, according to a paper published by the Chinese-language journal Railway Transport and Economy. The team which developed the app was led by computer scientist Zhang Zhiqiang from the China Academy of Railway Sciences, a government research agency overseeing the development of new train technology. Instead of the U.S. dollar, the sales platform uses Swiss francs as its standard currency for international exchange.
The new sales system is the international version of 12306, China’s domestic train ticketing app, which is now China’s most popular traveling app, with nearly 700 million subscribers. In busy holiday periods such as Lunar New Year, the app can handle 200 billion travelers each day, issuing more than 1,500 tickets per second without crashing. Bringing the ticket management systems from so many countries onto one platform was not easy, according to Zhang and his team. “The system needs to support different ticketing mechanisms in different host countries with different organizational structures and seat number rules, and provide convenient services for domestic and cross-border seat management,” they said in the paper. In China, passengers only need to show their identity card to board a train, but some countries still use paper tickets. Protecting sensitive data and the privacy of passengers also imposed some big challenges. To achieve the seemingly opposite goals of openness and security, the system will use open source software based on core technology developed in China. Following Laos, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam will soon join the system.
In just 15 years, China has built more than 42,000 km of high-speed rail at home, exceeding the length of the equator. China is pushing for the standardization and integration of rail networks spanning Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa, which would reduce travel costs, the South China Morning Post reports.
