Travelers wait for trains at Beijing West Railway Station, January 1, 2009. Millions of people started setting home on long journeys on Friday from Beijing as the city kicked off its Spring Festival travel season early. [Asianewsphoto]

Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hangzhou are the "most bustling hubs" before the Spring Festival, which falls on January 26, so railway authorities have added 319 temporary express passengers trains this year.

Despite these efforts, many passengers still feared that they might not be able to get tickets to get home in time.

Qiao Kejiao, a Beijing hospital clerk, said she might resort to being duty on Lunar New Year Eve and traveling on the second day, when traffic would be lighter.

In a work meeting that closed on Thursday, Railway Minister Liu Zhijun attributed the annual travel ordeal to inadequate rail networks. The work meeting decided that speeding up railway construction and securing railway transportation were the ministry's priority tasks in 2009.

Liu foresaw a "historic change" in 2012 when intensive investment would extend total track mileage to 110,000 km, including 13,000 km of passenger lines on which trains could run between 200 to 350 km per hour.

The scenario does not offer any immediate comfort. Associate senior editor of the Study Times, Deng Yuwen, said the real solution was not in hardware improvement such as more tracks but in management and service.

In a column in the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post on Saturday, he said that the per capita railway mileage in China was only 6 cm, shorter than a cigarette.

"Even after the mileage is extended from the current 78,000 km to 110,000 km, per capita rail lines in China will only be 8.5 cm. Can we really say good-bye to ticket shortages by then?"

The real culprit, he wrote, was insufficient capacity. To improve the capacity, foreign and private capital should be introduced to break the government monopoly in railway investment, he said.

The ticket distribution system should also be streamlined to avoid the "gray zone" where so-called "contract units" such as tourism agencies and outlets take advantage of contacts to hoard tickets that are then re-sold for illegal profits.

Ticket purchases under real names, a proposal that has been repeatedly rejected by the railway authorities, could help improve management and services, he said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 4, 2009)