BEIJING, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- Fifty-five stations along Beijing's rail transport network start from Saturday to offer cashless payment services, according to the municipal commission of transport.

The 55 pilot stations cover shopping areas such as Wangfujing and Xidan, as well as traffic hubs and transfer stations like the Beijing railway station, Sanyuanqiao and Terminal T2 and Terminal T3 of the capital airport.

Passengers can buy tickets, recharge their metro cards and pay excess fares by scanning QR codes on both ticket windows and machines in those pilot stations.

All rail transit lines in the city are expected to achieve full coverage of QR code payment by the end of August.

Beijing rail transit has so far more than 17 million registered online-ticketing users and QR code payments have been used over 600 million times since August 2017.