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End of the Line for France's tix validators

 

Another railroad tradition is about to disappear, victim of technological advance. France's railroad operator SNCF is doing away with the thousands of yellow boxes on its platforms that travelers use to validate their paper tickets.

That's mainly because there are increasingly few tickets to validate. As online ticket sales have increased and even bought-at-the-station tickets can be transferred to smartphones, less than 4% of rail journeys involve the paper tickets that need to be stamped or punched.

The validation used to be necessary because most tickets had weeks or months of validity, and the punch kept them from being reused, but nearly all tickets are now for a specific date or train.

Over 3,000 of the validators will be pulled this year, and the rest shortly after, and the railroad will soon stop issuing the card-stock tickets that were used with the machine. Passengers who download and print tickets at home can still have them scanned by the conductor, who also checks QR codes on electronic tickets.

The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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