Yes; ink stamp with station name and date. It is problematic when the station staff forget to change the date. That happened to me in Berlin once.
The problem with Sweden's process of railway marketization is that (unlike the UK) there has been no concerted attempt to maintain a single ticketing system. Most operators do cooperate, and most journeys can be purchased from most operators, but there are one or two exceptions. Unlike the UK, the sparse population has already led to a decline of station services before marketisation, so there was no expectation that train operators would be obliged to serve the small number of people who don’t engage digitally in their service.
There will be a small number of groups for whom this change is very inconvenient: one-contry Interrailers visiting Sweden, multi-country Interrailers starting their trip in Sweden and FIP pass holders are such groups.
Being a Brit who emigrated to Sweden, I suppose I have been through the pain barrier on this and adapted.
Sweden is one of the most "digital" countries in the world, in the sense that scores of digital literacy and digital accessibility are very high. Swedish media does occasionally highlight the plight of older people or those with impairments that prevent them from accessing services, but the popular urgency for that seems to be waning.
To give an example of how my life in Sweden differs from my old life in the UK, consider a day I spent last week. I needed a haircut, so I booked a time online at my barbershop. In normal times, I might have taken the county bus, in which I case I would have used my Swedish phone to buy a bus ticket on the county traffic authority's app. It would generate a QR code which I would scan when boarding the bus. You cannot pay a bus fare in cash. Likewise the train. Tickets aren't available at the station. You can use a debit or credit card to buy a ticket from the conductor, but most will use an app and generate a QR code.
However, because of COVID, I decided to drive.
The car needed petrol, so I gassed up a self-service petrol station. I remember these appearing at Asda in the UK in the last few years, but they were in the minority. Today, about half of all petrol stations I drive past on my way to town are completely self-service. These have touchscreen card machines, or you can use the gas station's app to pay from inside the car. The cold climate seems to incentivise this. I think the petrol station companies also encourage us to pay this way by getting customers who pay by card not to pay at the pump itself but at one or two standalone machines: saving money by reducing the need for expensive weather-proofed card payment equipment.
I found a parking space in town and paid for one hour of parking using another app. I could shorten or lengthen the parking ticket as necessary from my phone. I will get a summary of all my parking and then a direct debit at the end of the month.
Of course, the barber doesn't accept cash. He uses Swish, a national system supported by all the banks together which allows me to scan a QR code on the counter or enter his phone number. Our Swish accounts are tied to our bank accounts. When I press "Swish" to authorise the (phenomenally expensive) cost of the haircut, it invokes another app to open called BankID. BankID is common to all banks and used for authorising not only payments but also log-in credentials on government websites, loyalty card accounts etc. It's tied to my 12-digit social security number (which is on my ID card and, incidentally, is also my driving license number). The money moves electronically in seconds.
On the way home I pick up a prescription. The day before, I logged onto 1177.se (the national healthcare portal) on my laptop using my social security number. It remotely invoked the BankID app on my phone for confirmation, which I picked up and responded to. The website got a positive signal from BankID and let me in. I requested a repeat prescription of routine medication. The doctor gets a notification, but unlike in the UK he doesn't need to print or sign anything, or "send" the prescription. When I get to the
apotek the pharmacist scans the QR code on my driving license and retrieves the prescription. I pay using contactless card. They do not take cash.
All this is fine and dandy if you live here, but it was a nightmare when we first arrived. It took about a month to get a social security number, then ID cards, then bank accounts and then driving licenses. Until then we were reliant on cash, which many retailers (and, believe it or not, banks) refuse to accept. I can count the number of ATM in my local town on the fingers of one hand. Since June 2020 I haven't touched a coin or banknote (and that last transaction was only because a local tradesperson wanted to sell me firewood without the tax agencies knowing about it.) Since we couldn't prove our identities by the magic combination of social security number and BankID, we had to live a very simple life, relying on a foreign credit card and occasional cash withdrawals. We couldn't even get a supermarket loyalty card, because that is created by scanning your driving license and using your social security number as the identifier. (One unexpected side effect of life in Sweden is that my wallet is no longer bulging with proprietary loyalty cards... no need for all that plastic, they just scan my driving license.)
So, yes, this will be an inconvenience for visitors to Sweden. One can hope that most Interrailers or FIP-holders will land in Sweden at places like Arlanda Airport (where there is a higher-than-average provision of staff and information for arrivals) or that they will come via Germany and Denmark on passes that have already been stamped.
Edit: one final additional thought. SJ is closing these ticket offices because they're expensive. Labour costs in Sweden are expensive, and the space occupied by these ticket offices is expensive to rent from the Jernhusen AB, the company created on privatisation to manage railway stations. Before and especially during COVID, not many people used them: just tourists and the small number of people who don't engage with SJ digitally. It is, unfortunately, a consequence of the relative wealth of Sweden and the advance of the digital society that they are deciding to withdraw these services.
