For some people, preparing for a train journey is either fun, part of their job or sheer hard work. But very few could have worked as painstakingly as Wang Qing did last week.

Wang is head of a Beijing prison guard team. He was to lead 24 prison guards to escort 88 prisoners back to their places of birth in central China's Hubei and Hunan provinces, according to a report in the Beijing Times.

Fourty-six were to be handed over to police at Wuhan railway station, and the rest at Changsha Railway Station, to serve out their sentences in the provinces where they were born.

Though Wang had been leading such tours for four years, he had to do his homework meticulously.

Police take a roll call in Changsha before shifting the prisoners to jails in Hunan Province.

After the usual meeting with the other guards, he fell back on the computer for the minutest details of seating arrangements, treating the prisoners separately according to the nature of the crimes, how best to guard them, etc.

Here's what the computer diagram helped him accomplish:

The 46 prisoners to be handed over to police in Wuhan were seated closer to the exit because they would get off first.

The women, 12 in total, in each group were seated separately. Then the accomplices and relatives, two each, were separated from among the more dangerous prisoners.

Doors were unhinged from the toilets to prevent any prisoner from locking himself up and trying to escape by breaking the window.

Two prisoners were handcuffed together, and the dangerous ones were made to wear shackles. (The shackles, by the way, were 500 grams lighter than the usual ones to allow more freedom to the prisoners, Wang said.)

The handcuffs and shackles were then sterilized, police batons, walkie-talikies and searchlights tested and sleeping bags and food prepared.

Wang and his fellow guards relied on the computer to decide on the best time and way to serve food to the prisoners.

After the detailed and foolproof planning, the 88 prisoners boarded train No K157 around 9:10 PM on January 10.

But before that, one small thing had to be fixed. The guards shifted the fire axe and extinguisher from their original places in the compartment.

Though the journey was still tense, it definitely was a little less risky than the previous ones Wang had taken.

The first batch of prisoners was handed over to Wuhan police on January 11. Later that night, Changsha police took charge of the rest.

(China Daily January 16, 2007)