14 DAY TRIAL // The Chinese New Year break, or Spring Festival, is the only time of the year when average workers, who have moved from the countryside to help build the country's ever-growing economy, are allowed to return to their homes in the most remote provinces, to be with their families and share presents with them. As a result, most of the more than 200 million workers take to the train stations during a two to three week interval. This results in a massive jam of the railways each year, as most of the tickets are sold for no-seat spots.
There's not much Chinese workers can do about this. They have to get on the trains and suffer crowded conditions for up to 3 or 4 days of journey through the vast nations. But this year, two workers who embarked on a train for Beijing from the Shanxi province found themselves in a completely awkward situation, as they were the only two passengers of the vehicle. And their ride was a supplementary train, introduced solely for the purpose of relieving some of the congestion from the main lines.
"There was no one and there was not enough heating or light. When the train went through a tunnel, it was pitch black. It was like a ghost train. I could not get a standing-room-only ticket for the regular trains, how could there be no passengers on a temporary train?" one of the travelers, known as Zhang, wonders, quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily.
The newspaper also says that the L342 train, which was by all accounts supposed to be crammed too, had no clearly-established departure and arrival times, and that, most likely, the mechanic decided to leave from Shanxi at his earliest convenience. The reason for this is not yet known, but the passengers state that the train had no commodities turned on, and that their ride was a thing of nightmare.
During this year's holiday season alone, the police fined more than 6,500 passengers with no tickets, while an additional 40,000 scalped tickets were retrieved. Their value amounts to some $730,000.