Let the Spring Festival ticket rush begin

For China, a country that’s adding thousands of miles of new rail track each year and will soon boast one of the fastest networks in the world, the crush of train passengers during Spring Festival and Chinese New Year is still one of the system’s greatest tests.

And one it doesn’t always pass. 

The week-long national holiday is one of the few -- and possibly only -- times many in China are able to take enough time off to return to their home towns.

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Although the 40-day Spring Festival rush officially starts on January 19, people began lining up at Shanghai railway stations’ 800 ticket booths this past weekend to try and get their hands on early tickets.

Train tickets to some of the most popular destinations, including Chongqing and Chengdu, were sold out within minutes, leaving many to try their luck with the crowds again in a few days when more tickets become available.

Shanghai Railway station opened 150 temporary booths in the area outside the main building to deal with the additional crowds.

Rail officials told Shanghai Daily that train ticket sales “will peak between January 16 to 23, with daily sales set to exceed 200,000 tickets. More than 70 temporary train services will be added to cope with the exodus from the city.”

This increase in capacity comes on the heals of an announcement by China's Ministry of Railway (MOR) that it will add an additional 586 trains per day nationwide during the 40-day travel peak.

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More than 6.5 million of Shanghai’s estimated 20 million people left the city via train during last year’s Spring Festival, and numbers are only expected to increase this year.

MOR estimates that 6.2 million passengers will travel by train each day across China during the 40-day travel season, up 11 percent from 2010, with most traveling in the days before the Lunar New Year, which this year falls on February 3.