Time to get back to work
Passengers take trains back to Shanghai after the weeklong Spring Festival holiday.
The hoards who left town to celebrate Spring Festival are coming back. The vacation is over. The nation, the city and every office, factory and public institution return to work.
Over half a million passengers arrived by train on Sunday, according to Shanghai Railway Station, about 200,000 more than on an ordinary day.
Zhu Ziqiang, a businessman from Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, brought his two daughters and parents back with him. They arrived around noon. He was pleased to see self-service information facilities installed at every arrival gate in Hongqiao railway station.
"People unfamiliar with the station like my daughters can easily check the directions to bus and Metro stations," said Zhu. “The first couple of times I came here, I often got lost.”
Zhu consigned his daughters to the Metro and took his parents to the taxi rank. A digital screen told him that it would take about an hour to get a cab.
The 3,000 taxis dispatched to the three railway stations and two airports were far from enough, but 20,000 cabs were standing by.
For those reluctant to wait for a cab, the Metro kept on running until well after hours. Line 2 kept running until 1:30am on Monday between Hongqiao and Longyang Road. Line 10 ran until midnight.
More than 20 temporary bus routes at the weekend carried footsore and weary passengers to every corner of the city and ultimately back to work Monday. Most operated all night.
