For many people wanting to return home for the Spring Festival, telephone booking a train ticket seems to be almost a mission impossible.
The first day the ticket booking system opened Monday (Jan 10) on 9510-5105 and 9602-0088, which had 20,000 lines, most callers were told tickets had been sold out.
Shenzhen railways expect to transport 900,000 passengers during the pre-festival period at full capacity. This figure is dwarfed by the more than 4.85 million people who plan trips home by train.
Shenzhen Railway Station will operate 38 trains during the pre-festival period.
If a caller books three tickets at one time, a total of 60,000 tickets could be booked at once.
A train carries a maximum of 1,200 passengers and only the first 400 callers could snap up the tickets. It was possible that some tickets for popular destinations such as Wuchang in Hubei Province and Changsha in Hunan Province could be snapped up in 30 minutes," said Yi Mufan, an office director at Shenzhen Railway Station.
"Although we have continued to impose the ID-based booking system to curb scalping, we can't solve the basic problem of huge demand and limited supply," Yi said yesterday, responding to a public outcry.
Those who failed to book by phone rushed to counters to try their luck, yet most returned empty-handed.
To encourage residents to book tickets by phone and avoid overcrowding at railway stations, the railway ticket offices and ticket outlets would sell tickets only six days ahead of departure dates from Monday. Tickets not sold by phone would be returned for counters to sell.
Yi suggested those unable to book train tickets resort to other modes of transport to return home.
To curb ticket scalping, the Guangzhou Railway Group, the operator of all railways in Guangdong Province, required callers to quote a verification number randomly provided by the booking system along with the phone area code. This would prevent ticket scalpers from using an automatic dialing device which repeatedly calls the system to book tickets.
Air tickets to dozens of cities such as Wuhan, Changsha, Chengdu, Zhengzhou and Chongqing were sold out, China Southern Airlines said.
Some air tickets for dates after Jan. 28 were now selling for full price.
(By Han Ximin)
