China had been working to cope with the flood of travelers with more railway construction and crackdowns on train-ticket scalping.

In China, it is often difficult to obtain train tickets during peak travel seasons.

At Beijing West Railway Station, some 100 temporary ticket-selling booths have been set up to make buying tickets easier, allowing 5,000 people to simultaneously queue for tickets.

However, Wang Zhiguo, vice minister of railways, admitted China's railway transportation was still "far from" meeting the social demand, despite that China put into service 480 trains on its newly constructed high-speed railways and added some 8,540 ordinary trains to its national network in the past year.

During the 2001 Spring Festival period, some 1.66 billion passenger journeys were made. In the 2005 period, there were 1.9 billion. In the 2010 period there were 2.2 billion.