At 1:43 a.m., a train pulls out of Beijing Railway Station (BRS), heading to Shangqiu, a small town in central China's Henan Province. Qin Gongquan, 51, slouches in a window seat, relaxing after a long year's toil in the city.
Qin is lucky to have a hard sleeper for his 10-hour journey home, thanks to his daughter who helped book the ticket online.
"Only when they marry will my burdens ease," Qin says of his grown-up children and grins. He grows two crops of rice a year in Shangqiu. In between, he comes to Beijing to work as a mason. Every year, he boards a train in BRS clutching "the cheapest ticket even it means a long journey".
AROUND THE CLOCK
On the day Qin goes home, BRS sees 161 two-way trains take away more than 150,000 passengers. The 40 days of "Chunyun", referring to travel rush around the Chinese Lunar New Year period, sees the world's largest human migration, with about 4.2 million people passing through, arriving at or leaving from BRS.
At 6 a.m., the day's first travel peak begins and 1,500 railway staff are working hard to keep trains on schedule so passengers can have a safe journey.
Liu Wanjun, 56, works all night to make sure passengers have enough hot water. He and his colleagues run water pipes across the tracks day and night during the cold Chunyun. They must take care not to be sucked into the airflow of moving trains.
"A decade ago, there were only 80 to 90 two-way trains," Liu says.
At 8 a.m., a new shift begins and Liu reminds them to eat well before work: "The second travel rush is from 10:30 to 12:30 and the third from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. - dinner time."
BRS was planned and built in 1959 to mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Over the years, the facilities have been modernized, but the staff still call different units "che jian", a traditional Chinese name for the BRS teams working in the information, ticketing, operations, repairs, rear service units and others.
Years of operation have created a well-oiled "transportation machine". "Long before Chunyun became a major issue, BRS was operating efficiently with heavy loads," says Xie Jingyi, chairperson of the BRS workers union.
LONGING FOR HOME
At 9:20 p.m., Sun Peng, who works at a seafood store, has been waiting almost 10 hours in a BRS waiting room.
Passengers are crammed into all the waiting rooms. Sun offers his seat to a family and sits by a cooler full of clams, razor shells and oysters. This is for his parents who rarely eat seafood in Qiqihar, a northeastern city about 1,500 kilometers from Beijing. "In our hometown, people rarely see seafood," says Sun.
