China's national railway service concluded its busy two-month summer travel season on Monday, after transporting 954 million passengers across the country and seeing trips by foreign nationals up nearly one-third compared to the previous year amid the popular "China Travel" trend.
The China State Railway Group said Tuesday it had operated an average of more than 11,600 passenger trains per day during the period between July 1 and Aug. 31, with additional train services having been arranged to meet the surging travel demand.
Foreign nationals made more 4.4 million rail trips during this time, which comes as China has been welcoming more international visitors with the expansion of visa-free policies in recent months.
The Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong high-speed railway handled over 6.2 million cross-border passenger trips, a more than 3 percent increase from a year earlier, while the cross-border China-Laos Railway carried some 56,000 passengers during this period, representing a nearly 56-percent year-on-year rise.
Meanwhile, other international passenger routes linking China with Mongolia, Russia, Vietnam and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) also continued to transport tourists during the 62-day summer travel period.
Strong demand for family vacations and educational travel prompted rail authorities to run almost 700 specific tourist trains, along with more than 350 customized services designed for concertgoers and sports fans. Operators said these bespoke services helped support cultural and tourism spending along their routes. Among them was the 18-carriage "Southern Train Baiyun", which began trial operations in late August on a four-day itinerary linking Guangzhou in southern Guangdong Province to key destinations in the central Hunan Province, including the popular scenic tourist spot of Zhangjiajie and the provincial capital Changsha.
Customized fan trains have also served the "Minchao", or the Fujian City Football League of east China's coastal Fujian Province, enabling supporters to make same-day trips to matches and linking sports events with local cultural and tourism consumption.
China Railway also piloted ticket-reservation services on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway and the conventional Beijing-Shanghai Railway and also introduced a nationwide reservation service for incoming university students, selling over 25.3 million discounted student tickets during the two-month summer travel season.
China's summer railway travel rush concludes with 954 million passenger trips
Smart and unmanned technologies are on display at the ongoing three-day Eighth China Grain Trade Conference, which opened Saturday in Changsha City, central China's Hunan Province.
More than 3,100 companies nationwide are attending the event, highlighting new technologies and products for grain production, storage, processing, and purchasing.
One of the attention-grabbing exhibits is an intelligent grain-leveling robot designed by Seedlight Robot for grain storage sites. The robot moves quickly within grain piles, autonomously avoid obstacles, and achieve precise positioning to smooth uneven piles into a flat surface.
"The main unit can plan the operating route for the grain-leveling robot. The radar can detect how even the grain surface is, and the robot itself acts as the hands and feet that do the [grain-leveling] work. It can largely replace manual grain-leveling operations and significantly reduce labor intensity and labor costs," said Li Yue, a representative with the Seedlight Robot (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
In the grain and oil machinery zone, an intelligent multifunctional rice-processing system developed by the Anhui Jiexun Optoelectronic Technology Co., Ltd. is demonstrating how artificial intelligence can automate key stages including hulling, milling and polishing. The system also integrates impurity removal and finished-product quality inspection to enable unmanned operation.
"Compared with traditional processing methods, this technology [embedded in the system] can reduce our broken-rice rate by about 3 percent, increase the whole-rice yield from 600 kilograms per ton to around 618 kilograms per ton, and cut energy consumption by roughly 20 percent," said Xu Yefei, a representative with the Anhui Jiexun Optoelectronic Technology Co., Ltd.
In addition, grain testing is moving rapidly toward full automation. A comprehensive unmanned grain testing system designed by the Beijing Guomao Dongfu Engineering Technology can evaluate wheat, rice, corn and soybeans. In one stop, the machine automatically analyzes 13 quality indicators, six types of toxins, four heavy metals and pesticide residues without human intervention. "The continuous testing time for a single sample is no more than 30 minutes. It can effectively address problems in traditional grain procurement inspections, such as too many testing items, complicated operating procedures, long processing times and the influence of human factors," said Liu Fangfang, a representative with the Beijing Guomao Dongfu Engineering Technology.
Smart, unmanned equipment on show at China Grain Trade Conference
