H O L I D A Y 10 LIFEIMAGE MONDAY FEBRUARY 26, 2007 CHINA DAILY Rush hour on the gift express Above: Chen People crowd Fei gives the mail a fi nal into post offi ces to look before loading them send gifts at this onto the train at Hankou time of year, but Railway Station in Wuhan of how do they get to Central China’s Hubei Province. their destination? Photos by Zhou Zhou Chao visits a Chao railway station to fi nd out ecember 10, 2006 was one of the busiest days for Lu Hua and other porters at Wuhan’s Hankou railway station in Central China’s DHubei Province. During the At dawn, they stood in freezing break, two por- wind waiting for the T68 train from ters exchange Shenzhen in South China’s Guang- notes on how dong Province. to enchant a The train was due at 6:49 am, but it girl during a was delayed and didn’t show up until date. half an hour later. About 1,000 mailbags had to be unloaded during the train’s half- hour stop. The team had to unload 33 bags a minute. It is the busiest time of the year for porters working at railway sta- tions who have been loading and carrying Spring Festival post since December. Train services in China experience their peak during Spring Festival ev- ery year. “It is traditional for Chinese to send gifts to friends and families before Spring Festival, so the volume of post increases dramati- cally,” Pan Liying, an employee at the Hankou railway station, told China Daily. On that busy day in December last year, the porters rushed to unload the mailbags as soon as the train had stopped. They piled the post from the T68 in Above: Each parcel’s tag needs to be scanned before a mound on the platform. It took the the parcel is loaded. whole group less than 30 minutes to Left: The packages are all ready for loading as soon as unload all 1,000 mailbags. the train pulls in. That task done, the team im- mediately began loading the post into trucks for delivery. That train’s post dealt with, some of the porters sat or lay on the ground, exhausted. Lu Hua says he and his nine col- leagues had been kept on their toes in the lead-up to this year’s Spring Festival. The work calls for high speed and effi ciency. The porters jokingly call the unloading process “looting the train”. Lu said they had to be extremely careful to ensure every mailbag was on the truck — each one contains hundreds of items. The porters deal with post from an average 23 trains and 18 trucks every day during the pre-festival pe- riod. Eighteen of those trains stop at the station for only eight minutes, but they still have hundreds of mailbags to unload. In the pre-festival period, Lu’s group unloaded about 8,000 mailbags a day, 1,000 more than usual. Large Above: Mail packages are sent to trucks once they are mailbags accounted for 80 percent of downloaded from the train. the mail, the heaviest weighing 100 Right: Porters get just eight minutes to download 500 Earth graphics by Google Earthkilograms. packages and upload 200.All information provided by the Central Meteorological Observatory.