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The Shere FASTticket system is a passenger-operated, self-service railway ticket issuing system, developed by the Guildford-based company Shere Ltd and first introduced on a trial basis in Britain in 1996, shortly after privatisation. It has been developed and upgraded consistently since then, and is now used by seven Train Operating Companies (TOCs) as their primary self-service ticket issuing system. Other TOCs have FASTticket machines at some of their stations, sometimes supplementing other systems. ==History and origins== In the last years of British Rail, before privatisation, the main passenger-operated ticket issuing system (POTIS) on the network was the "Quickfare" B8050, developed in the late 1980s by Swiss company Ascom Autelca AG. These machines were geared towards high-volume, low-value transactions: they only accepted cash, offered a small and mostly unchanging range of destinations, and were a minor evolution from similar earlier machines whose computer technology was based in the early 1980s. Quickfares were widespread, especially in the erstwhile Network SouthEast area, but their limitations were increasing as technology became more sophisticated. Shere Ltd, founded in its present form in 1992, initially specialised in self-service ticket sales/collection and check-in systems for airlines (notably the former British Midland and KLM UK). In the first instance, the FASTticket system was developed directly from these, with early FASTticket terminals resembling their airport equivalents in many respects. Only a small range of tickets were available, for example - mostly higher-value tickets to important destinations such as London; only debit and credit cards were accepted; touch-screen functionality was offered, but there were limited options and sub-menus; and some of the early machines only printed ATB-style tickets (Automated Ticket and Boarding Pass - an international standard format used by airlines, coaches, railways, ferries and other transport undertakings), which are large and inconvenient for passengers to carry, in comparison with standard credit-card-sized tickets. As more TOCs showed an interest in the system, the hardware and software were developed further, and machines were universally provided with printers able to vend credit-card-sized tickets (although receipts, card sales vouchers and seat reservations were sometimes still printed by a separate printer within the same machine, on glossy flexible paper cut from a roll - batch reference RSP 3598/3: (Example )). Before the now standard "Common Stock" layout and format was devised in 2003, credit-card-sized travel tickets were printed on either RSP 3598 or RSP 7599/SCT orange-banded, round-cornered, hopper-fed ticket stock with pre-printed headings. From September 2003, machines began to be converted to the Common Stock format, (printed by the Newbury Data ND4020 ticket printer) with the standard RSP 9599 stock (with no pre-printed headings) being used. The first machine to be converted in this way was at Didcot Parkway. Newly installed machines used the Common Stock format as from 2004, and almost all machines have now been converted to do so (as of 2006). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shere FASTticket」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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