Better Mazovian Railways ticket service 11 November 2022 on Krystian's Keep

During my studies at Warsaw University of Technology I used Mazovian Railways to go home and back to Warsaw. For a long time I’ve used the ticket machines to buy train tickets. The problem was that, due to the frequent departures, there was often a queue to use the machine. Turthermore, the ticket machine was often slow, sometimes even to the point of timing out. Then I tried buying tickets olnine through the Mazovian Railways website. It was horrible. You have to enter your personal details twice and check multiple checkboxes after scrolling through nested popups. It takes an unacceptably long time to buy tickets this way.

That’s why I made mazowieckie, live at km.krystianch.com. It’s simpler than the official store and it loads way faster in slow network conditions (like in a train!) and on lower-end devices. It’s not spying on you unlike the official one, which uses Piwik/Matomo to gather information like the size of your viewport and track your actions. It persists the connection you choose and your personal details in your browser’s cookies so that you don’t have to enter them manually again. There are also simplified descriptions of discounts because the original ones are difficult to understand. My inspiration for this project was this blogpost.

This service uses the internal HTTP API to purchase tickets. I use it with my partner every time we travel by Mazovian Railways. Tickets bought through this service were verified many times by ticket controllers.