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Finding ways out of a rail problem

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-20 13:21

Passengers at the train station in Guiyang, Guizhou province, make their way to the tracks on Jan 16. [China Daily]

College students make up the second part of the majority of passengers packing trains and stations during the holiday travel season, or chunyun.

Part of the 30 million student travelers during this period were made up of this group in last year's season alone, with most on medium- and long-distance trips, Yang said.

Zhao Jun, 25, a postgraduate student of Renmin University of China in Beijing, said he chose to pay 1,560 yuan ($228) for a 2-hour plane ride home to Chongqing this year, in order to save time he needed to find a job. He returned home by train last year, a trip that had cost him about 200 yuan and 56 hours of traveling time.

While there are also many who travel from city to city for family reunions, Yang said it is the migrant workers like Lu and students like Zhao - traveling from large coastal cities to small inland ones at similar times - who form the burden rail networks must carry.

With Spring Festival this year falling on Jan 26, coming weeks earlier than in previous years, the scene looks set to get worse.

Most students leave school starting from Jan 12, overlapping with the flow of migrant workers. On Saturday, both groups added to a record 5 million passengers, the Ministry of Railways said in a news release.

The record last year for passengers leaving prior to Spring Festival was 4.365 million people.

This perfect storm of overwhelming numbers can end up as such: Travelers blamed the authorities for not taking effective measures in selling tickets, with many tickets ending in scalpers' hands; while railway ministry and transport experts say it is not just the ministry's fault, blaming it instead on the limited capacity of rail networks.

However, the enormous influx of passengers is said to last for only 40 days in a year.

"On normal days, there is no problem securing a train ticket and nobody ever complains about not being able to get one," said Ji Jialun, professor with the Beijing Jiaotong University.

Still, the authorities are not taking any chances. The transport ministry said sending every passenger home is its duty and has taken measures to increase its capacity to cope with the higher passenger volume during the festive season every year.

The measures include adding temporary trains, selling tickets that maximize standing space (which sometimes means passengers will get a ticket but will have to stand for 24 hours or more), and this year, changing all sleeper carriages into seats on these extra trains.

The economic slowdown has also helped to increase passenger capacity. Wang Yongping, the ministry spokesman, said the railway departments transported less cargo like coal and oil this holiday season, so it opened more trains on busy routes partly aimed at making up the loss in freight transport.

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