We recently came across this article helping expats try to negotiate the Chinese rail network during the Chinese Spring Festival Period.  It's brilliant.

A telling quote from the article that gives an insight into the pure scale of the issue that the Chinese infrastructure is trying to cope with. 

"According to the official press release, 2011 Spring Festival Travel begins on January 19 and ends on February 27. In a period of 40 days, a total number of 2.85 billion people including 230 million rail travelers will join in the largest annual human migration in the world."

That's crazy!  To put that in context, our research suggests that there are just over 500m rail tickets sold in all of Europe, in a YEAR, while China is selling those in a 40 day period.  Not only that, but, as is outlined in the article, almost all of those tickets are sold by people lining up at the train station to buy them.  A telling insight can be seen from the line:

"Success opportunity to book original train is much higher than to book passing-by train. For example, D313 originates from Beijing to Shanghai via Suzhou. If you get on the train from Suzhou, then you are taking a passing-by train."

Sounds like they need an online ticketing system to me!

I also found the picture in this article on a really interesting blog, so credit to .