Rail passengers furious at being kept in the dark
Print Edition
Train services were suspended in south China over the weekend, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at railway stations and angry at the rail company’s inability to provide them with prompt information.
All services at Guangzhou Railway Station, a major hub in south China, were suspended from midnight on Saturday after landslides blocked the railway artery from the southern metropolis to Beijing, the Guangzhou Railway Corporation said. More than 80,000 passengers were affected by the suspensions.
Heavy downpours have caused landslides and floods in the north and east of the province.
The Beijing-Guangzhou line’s section in Guangdong Province reopened to traffic at 4:36pm yesterday after repairs that had taken workers many hours to complete. However, more than 20 train services will remain suspended over the next three days, thanks to downpours and speed limits in various areas.
Thousands of people were packed into the Guangzhou station square on Saturday, in heavy rain, after finding that their trains had been canceled. There were long queues for refunds.
Passenger Wang was heading for Sichuan Province in southwest China and arrived at the station at 8am. But there was no information about her train at all. Wang follows GRC on its Weibo microblog, but she got nothing useful in the five hours that followed.
“I was at a total loss until noon, when the big screen said the trains were suspended,” Wang said. “If they’d put the notice up earlier, I wouldn’t have waited so long in the rain. And they didn’t make it clear which trains were canceled.”
Confused passengers like Wang could do nothing but wait anxiously at the station.
The situation got worse during the afternoon. All check-in entrances were closed and guarded, and there were few railway staff available to answer inquiries.
Passenger Huang Liyan was furious about the lack of information. “We cannot ask anybody about the trains. There is only the big screen and some unclear directions from the loudspeakers. I wonder why the railway staff aren’t here to let us know what has happened.”
Passengers are required to return tickets within 48 hours to have a full refund, but the queues were hopelessly long. But as information spread later through social media and the Internet, the crowd began to thin out in the evening.
The railway company has extended the time for refunds to five days. All check-in counters at the Guangzhou station were turned into refund counters yesterday and passengers were allowed to return tickets for a full refund at any station in the province.
Ran out of cash
“We’ve opened 68 refund counters,” Wang Wei, deputy director of the station, said yesterday. “Three million yuan (US$490,000) in cash was sent here last night. But we ran out of the cash only in a few hours. We’re borrowing money from nearby stations.”
Snow and ice in south China caused enormous delays at Guangzhou Railway Station in 2008. Since then, the Guangzhou government and the rail company have become more experienced in handling passenger problems, said a public management expert. “But their performance in informing the public is far from satisfactory.”
“The train information is slow, unclear and poor channeled,” said Cai Lihui, a professor of governance at Sun Yat-sen University. “Train suspensions and delays began early in the morning, but the passengers had no idea which services were affected until nightfall. The rail company didn’t make use of the Internet or mobile services.”
Cai said building a multi-channel information system is a matter of urgency for rail companies.
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