Train tickets went on sale Thursday for the first day of the Spring Festival travel rush, the 40-day travel peak during the Chinese New Year holiday.

This year, China Railway Corp has scrapped pictorial verification checks for the online purchase of most tickets, in a bid to streamline the buying process during the rush, which runs from Jan 13 to Feb 21.

Since the beginning of last year, the railway operator's official website — 12306.com — had required users to verify a booking by selecting a photo.

This security feature has now been removed for 60 percent of tickets. The other 40 percent are understood to be for the most popular departure or destination stations, such as Beijing and Shanghai.

According to media reports, research on data collected via the Qihoo 360 browser showed that accuracy for pictorial verification was just 8 percent.

"Compared with letters and numbers, the images are just too fuzzy to recognize," said Song Wenbo, a college student in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, who returns home to Jilin province each Spring Festival.

"I was always afraid of tickets being sold out before I could figure out the pictures."

The security feature was put in place to prevent scalpers from using software that allows them to buy hundreds of tickets within seconds.

China Railway Corp predicts the rail network will handle 356 million journeys this Spring Festival, up 9.7 percent from last year.

"My hometown is in Manas county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and the most convenient way to get home is by train. It will be faster for me to get a ticket if I am lucky enough to avoid the image verification process," said Zhang Jing, a policy researcher in Beijing.

Li Hongyang contributed to this story.