GUANGZHOU (CNN) — Being stuck for hours at a train station is unpleasant but even more so if you’re trapped with thousands of other passengers.
Vast crowds trying to head home for Lunar New Year celebrations were stranded at Guangzhou Railway Station, in southern China, after snow delayed at least 22 trains.
Guangzhou Railway Corp said Tuesday that 38,000 passengers were stuck, but China’s People’s Daily said the crowd was much bigger — as many as 100,000.
“Guangzhou area’s chunyun (Spring Festival migration) control center inspects and estimates that there are 38,000 waiting passengers in the area,” Guangzhou Railway Corp said in a notice Tuesday.
“An earlier rumor on the Internet that there’s a gathering of 100,000 is untrue.”
China’s annual Spring Festival migration — when millions of Chinese workers head to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year — started on January 24 this year and lasts for around 40 days.
It’s expected that 2.9 billion trips will be made in the period in 2016 including 332 million trips by train.
Guangzhou Railway Station alone transported 130,000 passengers on the first day.
Emergency response
The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau (PSB) said it had deployed 1,300 extra officers to the railway station and issued an emergency alert.
The Guangzhou PSB declined to answer questions when contacted by CNN.
Guangzhou Railway said that passengers were advised to arrive no earlier than three hours before their train’s scheduled departure and they could check the latest timetable on its Weibo social media account.
It added that additional trains would be deployed and delayed trains wouldn’t be sent to depots for inspection, with any maintenance taking place directly on the platforms.
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