China Travel Advice

The Chinese Lunar New Year is still more than one month away, already mangers at Shanghai Railway Station are already gearing up for the holiday rush.

The Chinese Spring Festival for the upcoming year, the Year of Ox, falls on January 26, 2009. According to Shanghai Railway Station, the transportation holiday season begins on January 11 and ends on February 19, for a total of 40 days. During the period, there will be over 100 more passenger trains in service, along with a a slew of other measures intended to move travelers quickly through railway stations in Shanghai.

The Spring Festival is the most important holiday for the Chinese, when people travel to join their families for the beginning of a new year. So, traditionally, the time before and after the Spring Festival is the heaviest travel time in China, when flights are fully book and train tickets become especially hard to come by. It is estimated that during the holiday transportation period, 6.65 million passengers will travel through railway stations in Shanghai, which makes an 8% increase in traffic volume.

In a separate development, earlier this month, china's railway authorities launched high-speed sleeper train service between Beijing and Shanghai. These fast trains, which are indicated in train schedules by the alphabet "D", had been in service without sleeping berths because they can reach their destinations in 9 hours or so, which seem to make sleeping berths unnecessary (the slower trains have carried sleeping berths all along). Now the Chinese authorities have decided there is niche market for the fast sleeper train service between Beijing and Shanghai and have thus introduced the said train services. Fares these sleeping berths on range from 655 to 730 Chinese dollars.