Train travel peaks on final day of New Year holiday in China

More than 8 million train trips are expected to be made on Thursday, the final day of the week-long Spring Festival holiday, as millions return to work from family reunions, according to the China Railway Corporation (CRC) on Thursday. The Lunar New Year holiday, the most important traditional holiday in China, comes to an end on Thursday and tens of millions of people will return to work from their hometowns. The CRC said it would operate 768 extra trains on Thursday to cope with the travel peak after 7.97 million train trips were made on Wednesday, about 656,000 more than the previous year. The travel rush coincides with snowstorms which have swept through central and eastern regions for two days and disrupted traffic in some regions, including Henan, Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The National Meteorological Center on Thursday issued a yellow alert for blizzards, the second-highest alert in the country's four-grade disaster warning system. To ensure safety, the CRC has lowered the speed limits for some sections of high-speed railway from more than 300 km per hour to 200. These include rails operating between Zhengzhou and Xi'an, Xi'an and Baoji, Baoding and Dezhou, and Dingzhou and Wuhan. China's transport system is often put to the test during "Chunyun," which literally means "Spring Festival transport," the 40-day travel period around the Spring Festival. About 3.62 billion trips are expected to be made via all modes of transportation during the 40-day period, which started in mid-January, according to official data.