Lin Tongfei

The student

Each Spring Festival since 2011, Lin Tongfei, a 23-year-old graduate student at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China, has undertaken the long haul back to his hometown in Pingtan county, Fuzhou city.

Only three trains a day make the journey from Beijing to Fuzhou, the capital of East China's Fujian province.

Train No Z59 leaves Beijing West Railway Station at 3:08 pm and arrives at 10:50 am the following day. Although the journey lasts a grueling 19 hours and 42 minutes non-stop, the train is usually on schedule. A ticket for a hard-sleeper bed costs 436 to 466 yuan ($70-75) for an adult and around 300 yuan for a student.

Train No K45 is much slower, taking more than 34 hours to travel between the cities. Train No D365 only takes 15 hours and 10 minutes. It leaves Beijing at 7:35 am and arrives in Fuzhou at 10:45 pm, but the tickets are more expensive. A second-class soft seat costs 673 yuan.

"D365 is not a good choice for me, given the ticket price and schedule," said Lin. "It arrives at Fuzhou late in the evening, but my home is still a two-and-a-half hour drive away. If I take that train, I have to stay overnight at a relative's home in Fuzhou and then I have to take a bus before 6 am in the winter chill."

Lin was desperate to book a ticket for a hard-sleeper bed on Z59 because the schedule is passenger-friendly and the ticket is affordable. He can sleep on the train and arrive home in the afternoon of the following day.

The pre-sales window opened 20 days before his scheduled departure date of Jan 25, so Lin rose before 8 am and logged on to www.12306.cn, the only official online ticket-purchasing platform operated by China's Ministry of Railways. The website told him tickets were still available, but every time he submitted an order, he received a failure notice, which either informed him that tickets were sold out or that too many people were waiting in front of him.

For three consecutive days, he and a friend attempted to buy a ticket on the website, spending at least 90 minutes online every morning. Their efforts came to nothing. Eventually they gave up. In the end, he got a hard-seat ticket for Z59 through the help of his university.

"The train ticket-purchasing platform is not transparent," he said. "People have no idea whether the tickets are sold out or not. Sometimes, I find dozens of tickets are still available on the website, but when I file an order, the tickets are suddenly down to zero. Often, you will find people buying sleeper-bed tickets after they have boarded the train, even though the website has said the tickets are sold out."

Moreover, not everyone has access to the Internet, which makes it difficult for migrant workers and elderly people, who are not keen on new technologies, to buy tickets online, he added.