Great train ticket struggle begins

Legions of people anxious to get home for the Spring Festival got up early Monday in a desperate attempt to secure rail tickets ahead of chunyun, the annual mass migration of Chinese people going home for the holiday.

Some residents told the Global Times they had abandoned all hope of buying a train ticket and opted to fly or stay behind in Beijing, or resorted to shady means, such as using a scalper or illegal software. The Ministry of Railways (MOR) makes tickets available 20 days ahead of the travel date.

In a casual survey of 15 people, seven interviewees told the Global Times they would go home by train, four said they would fly and four said they are staying put because they cannot get tickets.

Four of the seven got tickets through purchasing online through the MOR, two got them from ticket agents and the other bought them over the telephone. All seven had to wake up very early on Monday to secure the valuable tickets.

Qin Jihong, a 28-year-old executive assistant from an Internet company in Guomao, said she got up very early in a bid to buy tickets to her hometown in Guizhou Province.

"The MOR website started selling tickets at 7 am, so I had to get up much earlier and get to the office," said Qin, adding when she arrived she found several colleagues were already waiting in front of computers for tickets.

It took Qin two hours of refreshing the pages to get a ticket, but she still said she was lucky.　

For those who cannot bear jampacked trains and expensive flights, carpooling is becoming popular. The Mutual Help Coalition for Spring Festival Travel, a public platform sponsored by enterprises and hometown societies, has helped match car owners and passengers for two years.

Yang Mingzhu from the alliance said the coalition is a pure public welfare platform based on good will.　

"We hope this can help strengthen the connection between people. This platform is free, as during the trip car owners should not charge passengers any fees," said Yang.

"Everyone should submit their detailed personal information, travel route and emergency contact, so if there's any danger, we can track them in time," said Yang.

Others have turned to less legal alternatives. While the real-name registration policy for train tickets was designed to block ticket scalping, a scalper Global Times contacted claimed that he can help to get tickets with either a fake or real ID card.

"Get yourself a fake ID card and tell me the ID number, I can get you a ticket with that number," the scalper said.

However, there are risks to buying tickets with a fake ID, as police sometimes conduct identity checks. A passenger was discovered using a ticket with fake ID information by transit police, the Chongqing Evening Post reported on February 15, 2012.

Others have turned to a free plug-in for use on the MOR website, which automatically refreshes MOR's online ticket sales pages, filters out sold-out trains and informs buyers when tickets are available. MOR has complained this has led to extra pressure on its servers.

To aid migrant workers and students, Beijing Railway Bureau has sent out six vehicles equipped with ticket sales machines, the Legal Mirror reported. They can be found at points in rural areas and economic zones in the capital.

"We don't need to line up at railway stations and also don't need to pay a processing fee," a resident surnamed Li told the Beijing Daily on January 12 after he bought his round-trip tickets at Hongyan Donglu, Chaoyang district.

The vehicle can issue over 200 train tickets in one hour, and the service has been operating for three years. The MOR reserves a ticket quota for these vehicles, according to the Beijing Daily.

Chunyun is the largest regular migration in the world. According to the National Development and Reform Commission, 2013's chunyun will last from January 26 to March 6. It predicted the traveler volume would reach 340 million during the 40 days, an increase of 8.6 percent compared with 2012.