On the way to Xīnxiāng, Hénán (新乡，河南) from Tianjin we took a 动车, or fast train (often translated “dynamic train”). That was about 4.5 hours — super fast, super comfortable, and sparsely populated. On the way back we took an “express” (快速) train from Zhèngzhōu (郑州), which is the old kind of train but not the slowest old kind (to compare: Tianjin to Beijing takes three hours, 1.5 hours, or half an hour, depending on whether you take the slow train, express train, or “dynamic” train).
We rode in a “hard sleeper” car (硬卧车) on the way back to Tianjin. It was eleven hours long and completely full, arriving in Tianjin at 3am (final destination was Harbin, a 25-hour ride from Zhengzhou).
Sleeping was difficult because (1) it was really hot and stuffy until the sun went down, (2) the university age couple in the middle bunk opposite wouldn’t stop talking/snogging, (3) the snotty kid in the top bunk opposite wouldn’t stop coughing and sneezing and snotting everywhere. The bathroom is a metal closet, like an airplane bathroom in size, and that’s good because you don’t want to be falling onto that floor when the train rocks. Drains directly onto the tracks through a pipe. I mention it here because there’s no picture.
If I’d been thinking “blog” at the time maybe I would have taken better photos (these aren’t so great) and walked the length of the train just to see the different kinds of cars (soft sleepers, standing, dining, etc.). But these’ll give you an idea, anyway. Next time I’ll make it a big photo shoot and do it right; it’ll at least give me something to do! More info in the captions.
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[...] put a bunch of photos into a gallery, along with details about our ride in the captions. If a hard sleeper train ride is in your near or [...]
[...] China Hope Live – Joel gives readers a little taste of what it’s like to travel in the hard sleeper carriage (硬卧车) of a Chinese train. [...]
What’s the difference between “hard sleeper” and “soft sleeper”? I took a sleeper trains in China and other places in Asia as well, I do not know the terms. I always had a curtain I could pull and a kind of seatbelt to keep from rolling out of bed. They had those skinny carts selling chiao-tzu and drinks.
Haven’t taken a soft sleeper yet, but my friends say that in terms of comfort they’re about the same as a hard sleeper, and that the only real difference is the privacy. On a soft sleeper you and your bunk mates can close a door on your shared compartment.
The other main difference between “soft” and “hard” is that with soft sleepers you only have four bunks in each compartment, as opposed to six in the hard sleepers.
I noticed that in your hard sleeper, your compartments were *completely* open. In some that I have travelled in, the doorway is partially closed, such that your feet are against a wall, and there is a closed in bag storage space above the aisle (accessed from the top bunk). It is structurally much more like the soft sleepers (but still without a door).
My first hard sleeper that I travelled in here in China (5 years ago) was not air-conditioned. The windows all opened, and the breeze was very pleasant as we were moving. Pity they have “upgraded” to air-con.
Malaysian sleepers were completely different (in my experience). They had the bunks facing the other direction — that is, lengthwise, up and down the train on either side of a central aisle. They had individual curtains and belts (unlike the Chinese sleepers, which have neither).