Rail travel on the rise as Chinese take trains in annual pilgrimage home

Shanghai

MILLIONS of Chinese cram onto trains to make the annual pilgrimage home for the Chinese New Year holiday. It's a crowded and often uncomfortable experience that is rapidly being transformed by the country's push into the world of high-speed rail.

China already has the globe's longest bullet-train network, but it's plowing 3.5 trillion yuan (S$733.5 billion) into expanding its railway system by 18 per cent over the next two years, to 150,000km.