�Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec �009

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Advances in Ticketing SystemsIn-station Ticket Sales and Multi-Access Reservation System (MARS)

Seating ledger booking turntable (JR Systems)

As more passengers wanted reserved seats, this

turntable was devised to make allocation easier. It

consisted of a 4-m, motor-operated circular part holding

seating ledgers, surrounded by a 50-cm wide desk with

telephones. Operators who allocated reserved seats

sat at the fixed desk. Ledgers in each section covered

8 days of train departures (eight volumes covering that

day’s departure to the same day of the following week).

Operators removed the ledger for the train and day to

be booked, and replaced the ledger after booking the

seats as the turntable came around again.

Seating Ledger Turntable

Birth of MARS1: Tokyo Station Counter in 1965

MARS1 host computer (JR Systems)

The number of reserved seat bookings increased in line with

the rapidly growing Japanese economy and manual booking

was reaching its limits.

To solve the problem, the MARS1 prototype was

constructed to make computerized reserved seat allocation

practical. Reserved seat allocation started in June 1959 for

some trains. The scale of MARS1 allowed it to handle 4000

seat bookings/day using 13 networked terminals.

With the opening of the shinkansen in October 1964, the

number of reserved seat bookings topped 100,000 seats/

� Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 50 • Sep �008� Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec �009

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day. A networked real-time ticketing system was operated

from February 1964 to process everything from managing

seat allocation to automatic issuing of reserved seat tickets,

allowing efficient management of the increased volume of

reserved seats.

Tokyo Station ticket booking counter in 1965 (JR Systems)

The number of train tickets including reserved

seats increased annually due to expansion

of the shinkansen network and the huge

increase in the number of limited expresses.

In these circumstances, the MARS105

system entered service in September 1972

to handle the increasing volumes and to

connect with counter terminals automatically

issuing basic-fare tickets and non-reserved

seat, limited-express tickets.

Evolution of MARS105

About 500 MARS terminals for issuing automatic tickets

were installed at shinkansen stations and other main

stations in October 1965, increasing the speed of reserved

seat sales.

MARS105 system in machine room (JR Systems)

4Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec �009

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Advances in Ticketing Systems In-station Ticket Sales and Multi-Access Reservation System (MARS)

Continued on page 49

MARS ticket sales continued growing year-

on-year, with daily sales of about 1.6 million

tickets in 2002. Operations were switched to

MARS501 in July 2002 to process the huge

workload securely and quickly. The new

system was a well-balanced combination of

mainframe and servers.

A migration to counter terminals that

could handle high speeds and a large variety

of tickets was also made.

State of the Art MARS501

MARS105 was expanded soon after it

came into operation. By October 1974, it

could process 1 million reserved seats/day,

encompassed 1650 terminals, and handled

daily sales of 540,000 tickets.

New terminals that came into use with

MARS105 could print 192 characters.

Although the number of sections and

types of tickets increased greatly, station

counters with the new terminals did not

need ticket boxes holding tickets with

pre-printed sections, routes, prices and

other information, offering a tidier counter

environment and slashing the time needed

to service customers.

Tokyo Station ticket booking counter in 1974 (JR Systems)

MARS501 system in machine room at JR Systems (JR Systems)

49 Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 50 • Sep 200849 Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec 2009

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Advances in Ticketing SystemsOnboard Supplementary Ticket Terminals

Need for ChangesAdvances in automated sales and checking of tickets onboard

trains have been far behind ticketing services at stations, and all

onboard work was—for many years until recently—performed

manually in the traditional manner since railways first started.

Conductors required a long time to write special supplementary

tickets by hand. To save time, some sections used special

tickets (opposite) with pre-printed station names and fares and

the conductor simply punched holes for required items.

In addition, conductors checked tickets and fares with

devices such as quick reference matrixes, causing careless

mistakes. The conductor also had to tabulate ticket sales

after arriving, check figures against collected money, prepare

a ledger, and present everything to the conductors’ office,

where other staff had to double-check everything again,

requiring a huge amount of extra work.

However, technology advances at the time of the

establishment of JR East allowed ticketing devices to be

more compact, lightweight and portable. As a result, onboard

ticket terminals were introduced to speed-up onboard sales,

and lighten the burden of tabulation, statistics preparation,

reporting, and auditing.

1G Terminal Development started in 1988 and about 700 portable terminals

had been introduced on a limited basis for some sections

and stations in 1990. The terminals weighed 690 g with tickets

printed on thermal paper. Because conductors in Greater Tokyo

were used to map-type supplementary tickets, stations were

input using a map-type panel. A system was created where

sales data was consolidated via POS terminals at crew offices

and transmitted to the station income management system.

Ticket Printer Onboard supplementary ticket terminals at stations also

needed to handle magnetic tickets following the introduction

of automatic wickets. Because many tickets were for long-

distance travel, magnetically encoded 85-mm tickets

(season-ticket size) had to be issued. As a consequence,

a ticket printer was developed for use with the onboard

supplementary ticket terminal and about 400 were introduced

at major stations, etc., in 1993.

Special section supplementary ticket (map type) (JR East)

1G Onboard supplementary ticket terminal and ticket printer (JR East)

50Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec 2009

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3G Onboard supplementary ticket terminal (JR East)

2G Onboard supplementary ticket terminal (JR East)

2G TerminalImprovements were made to the 1G terminal and about

4700 of the new 2G terminals were introduced in 1991. The

basic operation was the same as the 1G terminal but major

improvements included faster printing (cut from 8 to 5 s per

ticket), and portability (10-mm thinner). The 1G terminals

were transferred to special ticketing work at stations.

4G Roll type ticket printer (JR East)

3G TerminalMore memory capacity was becoming necessary for

onboard supplementary ticket terminals as the business

system diversified, especially for compatibility with automatic

wickets introduced across most of Greater Tokyo from 1990

and to handle changes in fares when travelling between

areas served by the different JR group operators starting in

1997. Old 1G and 2G terminals were replaced by 6000 new

3G terminals in 1997 after 4 years of development, marking

the first full-scale model change. Major features included

(1) an additional function for issuing magnetically encoded

Edmondson tickets (short distance), (2) the ability to display

kanji (Chinese characters) on the LCD, (3) addition of a touch

panel, and (4) more memory capacity and a faster CPU.

However, the size and weight were slightly larger than the 2G

terminal due to the new functions.

4G TerminalThe aging 3G terminals were replaced by 4500 new 4G

models in spring 2005. They were the first to have a separate

main unit and printer and both were commercial products.

The reasons for using commercial products were to cut

weight, costs and development time.

The main unit is a personal digital assistant (PDA) running

a general-purpose operating system. A full model change

was made to the terminal as the interface was upgraded to

Advances in Ticketing SystemsOnboard Supplementary Ticket Terminals

51 Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 50 • Sep 200851 Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 54 • Dec 2009

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include innovations such as a full-colour, map-panel, station-

name input device inherited from the 1G terminal. The update

added features such as automatic route suggestion for

onboard tickets, greatly increasing operability. Moreover, the

main unit and printer are connected by Bluetooth wireless.

However, the need for onboard fare adjustment practically

disappeared in the Greater Tokyo area after the introduction

of Suica smart cards and the function for issuing magnetically

encoded Edmondson tickets was soon dropped.

85-mm ticket printer (4G) (JR East)

PDA (JR East)

An 85-mm ticket printer was developed by a company

in the JR East group following the widespread use of more

automatic ticket gates at shinkansen transfers and by other

companies in the JR group, requiring 85-mm tickets to handle

special ticketing at stations. These printers are much smaller

and lighter than the previous printer and also connect by

Bluetooth.

This article was originally published in Japanese in The 20th year History of JR East by JR East.

4G PDA and printer issuing ticket (JR East)

4G PDA and printer (JR East)