Amid cold drizzle and heavy fog, crowds of passengers gathered in the railway station square and long queues emerged in front of rail and road booking offices in Shanghai, China's largest city.

Crowds and queues were also seen at railroad and bus stations in other major cities across China, including Beijing, Nanjing, Chongqing and Xi'an.

Tuesday was the first day of the 40-day transportation rush associated with the Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, that falls on Feb. 9 this year. The busy travel season will last from Jan. 25 to March 5.

Each year China deals with a Spring Festival travel rush as people working or studying outside their hometowns head back home by train, ship, bus and plane for family reunions, which is a festive tradition among Chinese.

This year China greeted the first day of holiday transport wave more calmly than usual, as the nation has prepared well, with emergency schemes arranged in major cities for the festival rush.

In Shanghai, seven booking offices exclusively for college students were installed at the train station, and another eight round-the-clock railway booking offices have been established at the city's general bus station to sell tickets.

Meanwhile, the Shanghai railway station has also opened special ticket refund windows and set up waiting rooms tailored to students and migrant workers. It has also demarcated a 1,200-sq.m parking lot underground as temporary lounge, which is able to accommodate more than 2,000 passengers.

In Beijing, everything appears ready for the transport wave. At the West Station, one of the major railway stations in the capital city, all of its 200-plus booking offices are open around-the-clock, with the total number of passengers estimated at 110,000 for the first day of the rush season.

According to local transport officials, Beijing is expected to see 7.35 million inbound and outbound passengers by railway, 3.86 million by air, and 2.58 million by highway in the 40-day period.

Another factor behind the orderly operation of China's transport sector Tuesday was that in a few major cities, the traffic peak virtually started 10 days ahead of schedule.

Shanghai's railway sector accommodated around 100,000 passengers on average in each of the past few days. Tianjin, an industrial port city near Beijing, shipped out 300,000 people by train between Jan. 15 and Jan. 25. In Xi'an, capital city of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, nearly 400,000 college and training school students, or 84 percent of the total from outside the province, were transported out by railway over recent 10 days.

It is estimated that in the 40-day traffic peak season, 1.45 billion railway trips will be taken nationwide, up 3.5 percent year-on-year; 1.79 billion people will travel by highway, up 3.5 percent; and 27 million, by water, roughly the same as last year.

The country's airplanes will transport 12.6 million passengers in the period, up 12.5 percent, industry insiders predicted.

Source: Xinhua