The Ticketing Action Group (TAG) meeting took place on 25 June at the new SBB headquarters in Bern with 20 participants representing 15 railway companies.
The participants focused on the new UIC leaflets 918-8 which contained the standards for the layouts of cross border passenger train tickets. Layouts are defined on secured CIT paper (RCT2 and RCCST) and on blank paper and screens (A4RT and FST).
Security element standards (barcodes) are defined in leaflet 918-9. The writing of these leaflets in finished and both leaflets are applicable from 1 July among UIC members and should become ERA TAPTSI technical documents in 2019.
The meeting also discussed a new layout ticket definition for services on board trains such as bicycles, dogs and luggage. This new layout should be standardised at the next meeting.
The last meeting of the Reservation Expert Group (REG) took place on 26 June 2018. The function of the working group is to develop the reservation business according to the customer’s technical and legal needs. Currently they are addressing the future of the reservation list (UIC-Leaflet 171), which is an important tool for the distribution of reservations. The meeting discussed the requirement of moving the value added tax within reservation messages in order to print it on the ticket. The group discussed UIC’s vision of the reservation business. All goals were classified and for some of them a timeline was defined. RZD and SNCF stated that they were expecting personal data within the reservation request, which implies huge changes for all railways within the reservation network.
TAP-MD is in charge of developing interoperable solutions for online rail distribution and control. Currently a temporary work group of TAP-MD is developing a solution for NRT (non-integrated rail tickets) as e-tickets. This includes the online validation of such tickets as well as a white list and a black list and check-in mechanisms to make the procedures more automated and resilient. An important topic of the NRT e-ticketing is to include the options a train conductor has to make amendments to NRT tickets. The main functional features of the NRT e-ticket have now been defined and the work has begun on the technical specification
and architecture.
The current status of the word was presented and discussed with the wider audience of the TAP-MD meeting.
The work of the groups TAG and REG was also validated by the group.
The next TAG, REG and TAP MD Meetings will take place from 22 – 25 October in Frankfurt am Main at the kind invitation of DB.
