News Plus慢速英语:春运高峰铁路运输压力大 铁路改革不断推进

This is News plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China's transport system has been put to the test during "Chun-yun", a month long travel period around the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year.
Chun-yun literally means "Spring Festival transport". It's one of the largest annual human migrations in the world.
This year, an estimated 4 billion passenger-trips are being made during the 40-day travel rush, which started two weeks ago.
The Spring Festival is a major holiday for family reunions. It's a time when the country's several million rural migrant workers return to their rural homes for the holiday.
The travel season has placed tremendous burden on the country's rail and air transport.
Train tickets are hard to get. Passengers, mostly migrant workers and college students stand in long lines to buy tickets at railway stations. The situation become worse with rampant scalping, a major problem during the holiday travel season.
To make ticketing easier, China's railway authorities set up online ticket-booking websites, and a new online ticketing system is being tested and will be put to use soon.

In a related development, with transport capacity lagging far behind demand, China's fund-strapped railway sector will accept investment from a wide range of sources.
The State Railways Administration, the country's top railway authority, says private businesses have already landed deals for railway construction projects.
It has simplified review and approval procedures for privately funded projects.
The administration took over the administrative arm of the former ministry of railways in March last year, while the China Railway Corporation took over the business operations.
The administration has vowed to further improve their policies to encourage qualified enterprises of all kinds to participate in the bidding for rail construction projects.
China currently has about 100,000 kilometer-long rail lines, of which, about one-tenth is high-speed railway.
The railway network is set to top 120,000 kilometers by the end of next year.