A surge in passengers is testing China's railway capacity as millions head home ahead of the Spring Festival.
China began its 40-day Spring Festival travel rush Jan 19 and some 2.85 billion passenger trips are expected to be made.
About 2,265 train are transporting 6.2 million passengers daily, up 12.5 percent from last year, figures from the national transport authorities have shown.
Authorities have also stepped up the crackdown on ticket scalping, with police arresting 1,800 scalpers and confiscating more than 14,000 train tickets.
"China's railway capacity has much improved over the years, but it is still far from meeting the surge in passenger trips," Wang Yongping, a railways ministry spokesman said.
Train tickets are hard to buy, Wang said.
Xu, a middle-aged man, bought a ticket at Beijing West Railway Station for his trip home to Sichuan after queuing an entire day and night.
"You'd better call it a fight rather than ticket-buying," he said.
Despite the hard "fight", Xu was lucky because he did, in the end, get a ticket.
"Now I have to buy something to eat," he said while carefully tucking the ticket into his jacket's inner pocket.
Unable to get train tickets, more than 100,000 migrant workers in Guangdong are going home by motorcycle.
The Spring Festival travel rush emerged in China in the late 1980s, when millions of farmers from inland China moved to coastal cities to work.
More than 800 million passenger trips were made in 1989, and the figure increased as China's economy grew.
China's rail construction has accelerated in recent years but has not kept pace with demand, according to experts.
China's railways covered 91,000 kilometers by the end of 2010, said Zhu Lijia, a professor at the National School of Administration (NSA).
The new railways were mainly high-speed lines linking major cities, not the ordinary lines that low-paid migrant workers could afford to go home, Zhu said.
Instead of blaming passenger rail capacity shortages, Yin Xiaojian, a researcher with the Jiangxi Provincial Academy of Social Sciences says government policy should ease the impact of passenger traffic.
Students' winter vacations could be started earlier, for example, Yin said. The price of railway tickets before and after the travel rush could be lowered to change passenger flows.
Cai Jiming, a professor at Qinghua University, said a system that gives paid annual leave to the nation's 200 million migrant workers should be introduced.
Moreover, experts believe China's current uneven distribution of industry adds to the problem.
The country's labor-intensive factories are in major cities and China's coastal regions, and so the migrant workers from remote regions have far to travel, said Zhang Xiaode, an economics professor at the NSA.
Experts hope China's efforts to shift some of the labor-intensive industries to the underdeveloped central and western regions will change that situation.
