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Photo taken on Feb. 14, 2015 shows people arrived at Beijing West Railway Station for their journey home for the Spring Festival. [Chinanews.com]

Filing past the armed guards, Mr. Yang was pleasantly surprised to find little overcrowding when he arrived at Beijing West Railway Station for his journey home for the Spring Festival.

Like many millions of Chinese, he was making the traditional homecoming to reunite with family for the most important festive occasion in China. Like most of them, he was to find that recent modernizations of the train network and ticketing system have made the travel rush a much smoother, more civilized experience than the notorious ordeal of days gone by.

China's transportation authorities have estimated that almost 300 million people -- about the population of the United States -- will travel by train during the 40 days from Feb. 4 to March 16 this year.

However, the advent of high-speed rail has greatly increased capacity, and modern trains have made the travel experience a lot more comfortable.

Also over the past few years in China, train tickets have been put on sale further in advance, online sales platforms have launched, and real-name ticketing has reduced the amount of scalping. Gone are the days when hopeful travelers would sleep on chaotic station concourses, on the off-chance of getting a ticket from massively oversubscribed services.

And so it was that Mr. Yang, who was too shy to give his full name, prepared to board the G309 from Beijing to southwest China's Chongqing Municipality on Tuesday.

The 40-something computer technician from Chongqing told a Xinhua reporter he knows a few tricks for securing precious train tickets. "The closer to the Spring Festival it is, the easier it is to buy tickets."

After a few minutes, Yang and his fellow travelers began to board. It would be the first time that most of them had made the journey by high-speed rail.

Transportation in mountainous Chongqing and Sichuan Province has always been difficult. In the 1980s, it took over two days to reach Beijing from Chongqing and Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan. The area is one of the biggest sources of migrant labor in China, meaning high pressure during every festival travel rush.

Electricity multiple unit (EMU) trains briefly linked Sichuan and Beijing in 2011. The journey at about 200 km per hour took about 15 hours. But the services were canceled after the notorious railway accident in August 2011 that killed 40 people in east China's Zhejiang Province.

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