Sales of train tickets for Lunar New Year's Eve, the first day of the weeklong Spring Festival holiday, started today, January 6, reports Chinanews.com.

Travelers are able to purchase tickets via various booking platforms of China Railway Corp, including smartphone app, website as well as telephone.

Passengers buy train tickets via ticket vending machines at a train station in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province on December 23, 2018. [File photo: IC]

About 410 million railway trips are estimated to be made during the upcoming Spring Festival travel rush, an increase of 8.3 percent year-on-year. This year's Spring Festival travel rush, or Chunyun in Chinese, will start on January 21 and last to March 1. The travel rush is expected to peak in the first and last days of the holiday.

To lift the huge pressure on the rail system, China Railway Corp will put nearly 300 more high-speed trains into operation during the 40-day travel rush than in the period last year. More new railway lines have also been added compared to the previous Chunyun. On Saturday, a new set of 17-carriage Fuxing trains started running on the Beijing-Shanghai line, which have a top speed of 350 km/h and can carry up to 1,283 passengers.

A new set of 17-carriage Fuxing trains started running on the Beijing-Shanghai line on Saturday, January 5, 2019. [Photo: VCG]

To help passengers buy tickets easier, China Railway Corp has added a new function to its official ticket booking system. The function will automatically allocate canceled train tickets to other buyers who have paid in advance when tickets have sold out. It will save passengers the trouble of refreshing the website repeatedly to wait for canceled tickets.