Travel technology à la Russe: You can check in online and get a mobile boarding pass. You cannot scan this mobile boarding pass unless you print it out on paper. How else would the security staff stamp it?
You can buy a train ticket online and get an electronic ticket in your email. You cannot, however, exchange this ticket online. Nor can you change it over the phone. You have to go to a physical cashier’s window at a train station and wait in line.
Why can’t you exchange an e-ticket online or over the phone, I ask the Russian Railways phone operator? “Because,” he says, “we do not have this technological capability.”
Update: to change my train ticket, I waited in line at a ticket office for 20 minutes, only to discover that it was the wrong ticket office. The right one was in the other side of the building.
When I got to the right one—long-distance trains, rather than short-distance trains—there was no one in line. Out of politeness, I asked one of the cashiers, “Are you free?” To which she said, “You have to get a ticket.” I got a ticket and waited till she called my number.
Then she asked my passport twice. I also had to sign some kind of paper, also twice. All for an electronic ticket. That’s when I noticed that there was a Russian Railways ad smiling at me that said: “See how easy it is to buy electronic tickets!”
On the other hand, I was exchanging my ticket at Finland Station.
