China rail ticketing site now largest in the world

12306.cn, China's official website for purchasing railway tickets, has become the largest of this kind in the world, with combined sales reaching 3.5 billion in 2017, reports chinanews.com.

Photo taken on February 2, 2018 shows real-time train ticket booking information on a large screen at the China Railway Ticketing System control center in Beijing. [Photo: Chinanews.com]

"If all these train tickets were lined up, they would circle the earth 7 times," said Zhu Jiansheng, deputy director of the Institute of Computing Technologies with the Chinese Academy of Railway Sciences, where the ticketing system was developed.

Since its launch in 2010, the 12306 ticketing system has been upgraded many times to fix bugs and provide better service during the Spring Festival travel rush, or Chunyun.

A mobile phone user browses 12306.cn to book train tickets for the Spring Festival holiday in Beijing, February 13, 2018. [Photo: China Plus]

The system sold around 1.1 million tickets during the 2012 Spring Festival travel rush. Last year it sold 11 million over the same period.

Around 280 million train tickets have been sold on 12306.cn since January 3, 2018 when tickets for the Spring Festival holiday started selling.

The sales volume peaks at around 15 million per day, with nearly 700 tickets sold in every second.