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| A large number of passengers wait for buses home for Spring Festival at Langdong Bus Station in Nanning, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Thursday. (Xinhua/Lu Bo'an) |
More than 100 trains departed from the station, which has begun to operate 24 hours a day for the travel rush, from 2 pm to 10 pm. All of the station's nearly 2,000 employees have been kept on duty to handle the flood of passengers, and more than 700 volunteers have been added.
The station has also beefed up its security by mobilizing more than 1,000 police officers to patrol and crack down on theft.
The largest group of people returning home this week by train is white-collar workers. Most migrant workers and university students have already gone home, railway officials said.
To transport more passengers, railway authorities even launched overnight services on the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed rail line. From Tuesday to Friday, seven temporary trips will be made overnight each day on the Wuhan-Guangzhou section of the line.
In addition, the Ministry of Railways has decided to begin the sales of tickets for Feb 28 and March 1 on Friday, ahead of the scheduled Saturday and Sunday, the Chinese New Year's Eve and Spring Festival.
The move aims to free travelers from the anxiety of scrambling for a ticket during Spring Festival, the ministry said.
Normally passengers can book tickets 20 days before their departure date. However, reserving a ticket during the Spring Festival travel peak has become a source of anxiety and a test of will.
The Ministry of Railways' ticket-booking website, 12306.cn, handled about 200,000 users a second on its busiest days before Spring Festival, recording as many as 1.5 billion hits a day.
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