UIC Standards

The UIC publishes multiple standards for train ticket barcodes that are used in both international and domestic tickets. The published documents are called Leaflets and Internation Railway Solutions (IRS).

The currently valid standard defining barcodes is IRS 90918-9.

Historically, there have been multiple standards used by the UIC, which were defined in both Leaflet 918.2 and Leaflet 918.3, which are not valid anymore. These stanards are known as SSB, ELB and TLB, with each one being added to a different edition of the standards. You can read more about them on their subpages.

Due to the standards being paywalled and at the same time required by the European Union Agency for Railway (ERA) for international travel, the ERA created a document describing the standards known as TAP TSI TD B.12. It describes all the currently used barcodes for international travel, where mostly TLB is still used.