Trains (part 2) What was I thinking?

This is the second part of some of my crazy experiences with trains in China.

What Was I Thinking?

I was staying in Shanghai and had to make a trip to meet some people in Hangzhou, about 170km south of Shanghai. The journey takes about an hour in a high-speed train. Being the seasoned traveller and well-adjusted digital immigrant that I am, I had purchased my tickets on the internet weeks in advance. There was no way I was going to mess this up. The day before my trip, I meticulously planned my route from my hotel to the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, giving myself plenty of time to get there. My train departure time was 8:36a.m. - a small warning bell should have gone off in my head when I saw that departure time. Why 8:36? Why not 8:30 or 8:45, even 8:35, but 8:36? Anyway, I got to the station at around 8a.m.

The first surprise of the day was the size of the station. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have flown on international flights out of airports smaller than the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station.

Covering an area of 1.3 million square metres, and with 16 platforms, it is the largest railway station in Asia. Undaunted, I found my departure gate and since I had plenty of time, set off to find some breakfast. Having travelled on trains in Asia before, I wasn’t too concerned about time. In Thailand for instance, departure times are printed on tickets merely to give one an approximate indication of the day on which the train will be leaving. Being such a seasoned traveller and confident in my experience of Asian train timetables, I took my time and enjoyed my breakfast at a leisurely pace. Afterwards, I even stopped on the way to my gate to buy some gum and pick up a bottle of water, which is given free to all ticket holders - I thought that was rather a nice touch. I arrived at the gate to the platform from which my train was departing at 8:30a.m, but then I noticed that there was an “A” gate and a “B” gate, at opposite sides of the concourse. I was at the B gate. I quickly looked at my ticket and in the midst of a lot of Chinese characters I saw an “A”, but a little further down, I also saw a “B”. I wasn’t sure if I needed to be at A or B, so I walked about 100 metres across to A and asked one of the passengers queuing there. Fortunately, he spoke English and informed me that my ticket was for B.

I should briefly explain at this juncture, that this station, unlike any other I have ever been in, is built above the actual railway lines. The gate is a solid high-tech sliding door which leads through to an escalator, which descends down to the platform. One is unable to see any trains in the concourse area and the first glimpse you get of a train is when you get to the bottom of the escalator.

Anyway, it was now 8:32a.m. as I quickly made my way back across the concourse to gate B and joined the long queue there. I wasn’t at all surprised when by 8:34a.m. the gate still hadn’t opened. By 8:36a.m. I was feeling smugly justified in my assessment of Asian train time-tables. Then my eye fell on a small sign in English just outside the sliding door of the gate that read, “no entrance to platform permitted after 5 minutes before train departure”.

Huh!? I saw the words, but something was not computing. I read it again. There was no mistaking what it said and yet, here I was in a queue at 8:37a.m. with hundreds of other travellers waiting for the 8:36a.m. train.

Or...
were...
we?

With growing trepidation, I read the sign again and then in a moment of startling clarity, noticed, for the first time, that the tickets in the hands of my fellow passengers were a different colour to the ticket clutched in my, now suddenly sweaty, hand. I quickly looked at the ticket belonging to the chap next to me and saw that his ticket was for the 8:55a.m. train. I felt the blood draining from my head as I realised that my train was gone already and these fellow passengers whom I was happily queuing with were actually not fellow passengers, but travellers getting ready to depart on the next train... because everybody knows that train schedules in China run like clockwork and that the gates to the platforms open about 15 minutes before the trains depart and close exactly 5 minutes before departure...don’t they?

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