Passenger Rail Transport in China - Accommodation and Fares

Accommodation and Fares

• Business Class Seat (商务座), for all 16-carriage CRH380AL or CRH380BL trains. 3 seats per row (2+1). Lie-flat seats.
• Premier Class Seat (特等座), used for some CRH3 and CRH380 trains. 3 seats per row (2+1) or compartment seats. Unlike Business Class seats, these seats are not lie-flat seats, but can in general recline.
• First Class Seat (Chinese: 一等座; pinyin: Yīděngzuò), used for CRH series EMU trains. There are 4 seats per row (2+2), just similar as soft seat.
• Second Class Seat (Chinese: 二等座; pinyin: èrděngzuò), used for CRH series EMU trains. Similar as hard seat, there are 5 seats per row (3+2), the sitting area is relatively small.
• Hard seat (Chinese: 硬座; pinyin: Yìngzuò) is the basic fare, somewhat similar to the economy class on an airplane. On busier routes, passengers who cannot arrange for better seats because of overcrowding must also purchase this type of ticket. In some cases, tickets are sold with no seat assigned (无座, wu zuo), which allows the railway to sell more tickets than there are seats in the car. Still, even the number of "no seat" tickets offered for sale is limited, to keep overcrowding within limits.
• Soft seat (Chinese: 软座; pinyin: Ruǎnzuò) is one level above the Hard Seat. There are 4 seats per row (2+2), so it has comfortable seating similar to business class on airplanes.
• Hard sleeper (Chinese: 硬卧; pinyin: Yìngwò) is the basic accommodation for an overnight train. Despite the name, the bunks comfortably accommodate anyone below six feet. Bunks are arranged three on a side in a compartment - indicated by top, middle and bottom on the ticket. But there are no doors for the compartments.
• Soft sleeper (Chinese: 软卧; pinyin: Ruǎnwò) contains a wider bunk bed in an enclosed cabin, two bunks to a side. There is more room for luggage storage than in hard sleeper. Occasionally there may be an entertainment system where movie channels are available for viewing through headphones and an LCD display for each bunk. Now some CRH series EMU trains also have soft sleepers, such as CRH1E and CRH2E.
• Deluxe soft sleeper (高级软卧包厢 or Chinese: 高包; pinyin: Gāobāo) is the top level sleeper that is only provided by a few trains. The ticket is also much more expensive than that of soft sleeper. It only contains two beds in a cabin, and there is an independent toilet in every cabin, except for deluxe soft sleepers on CRH trains. Some of them have a shower cubicle in the car.

The fares are different between trains with or without air-conditioning.

• Second Class Seat
  (CRH1A EMU)

• Hard seat

• Soft sleeper

• Hard sleeper

The majority of train tickets in China are thermally printed paper tickets displaying the train's origin and destination, service number, price, date and travel time, accommodation type, class and seat number, as well as a barcode for security checks. Some tickets on the CRH routes such as Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou or Guangzhou-Shenzhen use machine-readable tickets i.e. tickets on the Nanjing-Shanghai route have a magnetically encoded stripe for future use of automatic ticket inspection gates being implemented at major stations along the route, whilst tickets on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen line have embedded RFID microchips which can be read by proximity readers mounted above the ticket gates.

Most trains feature some kind of on-board catering service. Vendors with trolleys walk through the train selling snacks, drinks, fruit, newspapers etc. On shorter distance trains, there is a cafe-car selling light snacks, tea, coffee, beer etc. whilst long-haul trains have full service restaurant cars.

Smoking is generally not permitted in the accommodation or washroom areas of the trains but is allowed in the restaurant/cafe area and in the vestibules between the cars. On modern trains such as CRH or Beijing Suburban railway smoking is completely banned. On the Guangzhou-Kowloon cross-border train smoking is only permitted in the cafe car.