Shanghai couriers offered free ride home for Spring Festival

A high-speed train giving deliverymen free rides home departed Shanghai's Hongqiao Railway Station on Jan 30, as the city's hundreds of thousands of couriers flocked back to their hometowns for the upcoming Chinese New Year.

The train, bound for Jinzhai county in Anhui province, carried some 400 couriers, whose hometowns are along the route to East China's Jiangsu and then Anhui province.

The train aims to take away the hassle of buying train tickets during the peak Spring Festival season for deliverymen, and provide a rewarding travel experience for those who have been shuffling across the city collecting and dispatching parcels all year long, said Yu Hongwei, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Postal Administration.

Fares for the three-and-a-half hour trip, priced up to 254 yuan ($37.8), were covered by Cainiao Network Technology, the country's top courier aggregator owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Hou Shaopo, 43, who has worked for Tiantian Courier for two years, was among the first group of deliverymen signing up for the benefit two weeks ago through an internal registration system.

"I work 12 hours per day and handle up to 200 packages on a daily basis. It's comforting to learn that we stand to enjoy such benefits and get recharged for the new year," he said.

China's courier sector raked in 603.8 billion yuan in revenue in 2018, up 21.8 percent year-on-year, while the volume of parcels surged 26.6 percent to 50.7 billion, according to statistics from the State Post Bureau.