The invention provides an identity verification system for railway passenger transportation. The system is composed of station-level management systems, road-administration-level management systems, and a China-railway-cooperation-level management system. The station-level management systems establishes face libraries and face feature databases and upload face images of key people in the face libraries to the road-administration-level management systems. The road-administration-level management systems receive and store the face images, uploaded by the multiple station-level management systems, of the key people. The China-railway-cooperation-level management system receives and stores the face images, uploaded by the multiple road-administration-level management systems, of the key peopleand issues face feature data information of the key people to the plurality of road-administration-level management systems, so that the multiple road-administration-level management systems issue the face feature data information of the key people to the face feature databases of all station-level management systems. On the basis of the three-level architecture, deployment of related services atthe cloud terminal is supported and application needs of passenger identity verification and blacklist comparison are met.