China Starts to Sell Train Tickets for Spring Festival Eve Online

Sales of railway tickets have already begun for the Chinese New Year's eve.

This year, train tickets are available online 60 days ahead of the actual traveling date, a new strategy to create a smooth travel peak.

Sales for Spring Festival Eve travel began yesterday, but did not reach the level reached on Friday when 5.6 million tickets were sold online for travel three days ahead of Spring Festival eve.

In order to avoid a server breakdown in peak selling periods, several new measures have been used to improve the website, including adding bandwidth and renting public cloud servers.

And refunded tickets will not go back for sale at the same time.

Zhu Jiansheng is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Computing Technology at China Academy of Railway Sciences.

"A ticket will not go back for sale immediately after it's refunded. The system will choose a random time point to put it back on sale considering the time period before its departure time. Even refunding 500 tickets at the same time will not cause the system collapse."

This year's Spring Festival travel rush, or "Chunyun", will begin on Feb. 4 and last until March 16.

For Chunyun 2015, China Railway Corporation plans to run over 3,000 pairs of trains, over 300 pairs more than last year.

Source: CRI