DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen

August 07, 2004

Beat the Hard Seat

Of China's many mysteries, perhaps the train system is one of the most unfathomable to me.

Every ticket office I've seen has been computerised - no mean task for a system as huge as China's. Yet what I fail to understand is the methodology for booking tickets.

Back in the UK, for example during the busiest period at Christmas, all you have to do is go to a station a few weeks in advance, tell them where you are going and when you want to come back and hand over the money. But this doesn't work in China.

For a start, you can't get return tickets. You have to buy singles, so you can only buy a ticket to return to your original point once you have reached your destination. Second, you can't book tickets more than ten days in advance. And with the legendarily high ticket demand of the railways this often means that if you arrive somewhere you are not guaranteed to be able to get back.

The only explanations I've heard for this is that the demand is so high that the system can't cope, and that the railway doesn't want to sell return tickets to people who might not be able to take them up. This doesn't make much sense to me, especially considering the system is now computerised, so if there are any explanations I'd love to hear them.

So it was that the 12-hour return from Kaifeng had to be on hard seat - which is effectively 'third class'. No sleepers, just rows of upright chairs. Bearing in mind a 20-hour hard seat journey from Qingdao I took back in October it wasn't a prospect I relished at all.

On the good side, despite the crowding in the carriage once I laid claim to my seat no-one took advantage of me and tried to grab it while I used the toilet at any point. It's pretty noble considering that some of the seatless may already have been standing up in the aisles for several hours.

On the bad side, before even getting on the train there was the typical bunfight at the door which inevitably slows things down for everyone. I wish people would just grasp the concept that if you wait your turn instead of trying to get through with physical force then it would work out better for all.

And once on it, despite the general decency of most of the other passengers I had to restrain myself from twatting the teenage boy who insisted on spitting on the floor at regular intervals. (I got into a conversation about the spitting issue back in Shanghai later that day but have still yet to hear an explanation.) The general mess and littering is also diabolical.

But all this being said, and despite the lack of sleep and chronic buttache, it got me from A to B in one piece, so I should be grateful for that...

Posted by Sendover at August 7, 2004 10:32 AM | TrackBack

Comments

I've concluded that for some destinations the sleeper tickets are a figment of the popular imagination.

Before I went down to Chengdu (26 hours by fast train), I checked with a number of ticket services in Beijing, and they all claimed it was impossible to get a sleeper ticket on that train. Four days in advance was the limit, but apparently the tickets were issued sometime around 9 or 10 on the evening of the 5th day, so if I wanted, I could reserve a ticket and they'd send someone down. They wouldn't guarantee me anything, however, and sure enough, the first reservation failed (they just laughed when I came back the next morning).

I asked if I could just go down to the station and stand in line myself. They told me frankly, "You'd never get one. They aren't issued all at one time, but rather to different windows in separate batches."

I tried for three days, and then gave up and got the hard seat. And as luck would have it, in our group of six, three people had children. No tickets for them, but who's going to be the monster that makes a child stand for 26 hours?

Once on the train I went to the service desk to try and upgrade, but there were alread 63 people on the list. I think the first two people were able to get sleepers...

So yeah, if you ever find out who you need to know (or kill or perform other unspeakable acts upon) to get a sleeper ticket, please let us all in on the secret.

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