Rail tickets for chunyun on sale on Wednesday

An extra 290 round-trip railway services or tours will be arranged in Shanghai to accommodate the huge number of travelers for chunyun, the Spring Festival travel rush. An extra 62 round-trip night operations on routes with large number of passengers — such as Beijing-Shanghai and Shanghai-Kunming — will be in place as well.

More than 400 million passenger railway trips are predicted during the travel rush, a daily average of over 10 million, China Railway officials said on Tuesday. 

This year's chunyun will begin on January 28 and last until March 8. Tickets for the first day of chunyun go on sale on Wednesday.

China's railway ticketing website — www.12306.cn — will operate from 5am until 11:30pm daily. 

Tickets for the Yancheng-Nantong high-speed line are now available. 

A direct rail link between Shanghai and Yancheng in neighboring Jiangsu Province debuts on Wednesday. Trains running on the 158-kilometer line will travel as fast as 350 kilometers per hour, with stops in Yancheng, Dafeng, Dongtai, Hai'an, Rugao South and Nantong West. It connects with the new Shanghai-Suzhou-Nantong train at Nantong West Station. There will be six trains daily on the route which will increase to a maximum of 47 on January 20.