As I blogged before, it is a really bad idea if you need to travel around China before the Chinese New Year. Students, migrant workers, people who work out of their hometowns are all going home. Everyone is on the road!
Official news has announced this year peak season starts from 30 Jan till 10 Mar.
To cope with the large demands, Shanghai train authorities will start the special ticket booking arrangements on 20th March (tomorrow).
According to the policy, most normal trains tickets are available 11 days before the departure day, CRH trains and some express trains tickets are available 21 days before the departure day.
So tickets of normal trains on 30 Jan will be available for purchase tomorrow (20 Jan) and tickets for 31 Jan will be available on 21 Jan, and so on…..
The ‘new’ tickets will be available everyday at 15:00 o’clock. This is to avoid people queueing in the cold night if it starts at 0:00 in the midnight.
Shanghai Rail suggested 3 ways to purchase the train tickets:
- Train ticket offices across the city
There will be 327 windows across the city to sell the train tickets. Some are open 24 hours. In addition, in Shanghai Railway Station and South Shanghai Railway Station, temporaryTicket Halls are set up to deal with the large demands.
- Ticket Vendor Machines
I saw those machines in Shanghai Railway Station. Very much like the ticket machine in Metro. Available in both Chinese and English.
- Telephone booking (95105105)
I tried the telephone booking but to be honest, it was not so friendly (see my previous blog here). Basically you can reserve a ticket on the phone and then collect the ticket at a pick-up office in the town within 48 hours. Service is available in Chinese only. And it also requires to enter ID number before the booking starts to avoid some ticket scalpers to purchase large amount.
Some websites, hotels etc also provide service to buy the train tickets and charge a certain fee. But during this special period of time, some companies have canceled this service because they can’t guarantee the service.
However, for short distance CRH trains (for example, Shanghai to Nanjing), those companies can still buy the tickets for the customers if you inform them early.
Tags: Shanghai Railway
