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Smoker delays bullet trains

By Xin Dingding (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-31 07:48

Smoking bans on bullet trains need to be strictly followed, railway officials urged passengers yesterday after three trains on the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed line were delayed due to alarms apparently set off by a smoker on train G1048, which was scheduled to leave for Wuhan at 2:50 pm Tuesday.

The train's operating system kept sounding error alarms, delaying its departure by nearly three hours.

"It took quite some time for machinists to figure out what was wrong," a spokeswoman of the Guangzhou Railway Group said yesterday.

"Some passenger must have smoked after settling down in the carriage while waiting for the train to leave," she said.

The railway company did not search for the passenger or impose any fine, as railway regulations are silent on the issue, she said.

Since the high-speed train is fully air-conditioned, smoking is banned even in toilets and in the part linking carriages, she said.

Other trains permit smoking in the toilets and in the space linking two carriages, but ban it in the air-conditioned carriages, she said.

Passengers will be reminded to desist from smoking as they board the high-speed train, she said.

"No-smoking" signs are already placed in the carriages. "Yet, it seems, more effort is needed to let passengers know that smoking is forbidden in high-speed trains and that they must follow rules," she said.

The train finally left Guangzhou at 5:35 pm, two hours and 45 minutes behind schedule.

The incident delayed two other trains, G6004 and G1054, by one and a half hour, and more than 20 minutes, respectively.

More than a thousand passengers were affected by the delay on Tuesday, Nanfang Metropolis News reported.

Many passengers were upset about the unexpected delay, the newspaper said.

"We took the high-speed train because we believed it could save time. But, now we don't even know when we will arrive," a passenger surnamed Yu said.

Seeing other trains leave on time, some passengers suggested that they should be transferred to another train, but received no reply from the railway authorities, Yu said.

"Providing transfer services like airlines do is a new problem confronting the railway department," Mao Baohua, a professor with Beijing Jiaotong University, told China Daily.

According to the existing regulations, passengers holding valid train tickets can transfer to other trains, but may end up without a seat, he said.

The high-speed rail service between Guangzhou and Wuhan was launched on Dec 26, cutting travel time from 10 hours to just three hours.