On right track to saving time and costs
By Wang Zhuoqiong (China Daily)Updated: 2007-05-02 09:10
Friends of "Farmer" consult him on train timetables if they wish to travel during the Golden Week holidays each year.
Farmer, whose real name is Liu Xincheng, is a 29-year-old student who lives in Nanjing city, East China's Jiangsu Province, and a self-proclaimed train enthusiast.
He collects train timetables, old and new, and studies them thoroughly. His friends say he knows the quickest and the most economical train routes in the country.
Farmer is one of a growing community of train lovers who have put their knowledge to good use. They belong to a website, Hasea.com, to communicate with each other and offer the public advice.
Since its founding seven years ago, the website has grown into an online community with about 30,000 registered users and 300,000 visitors a day.
Its founder, Liu Haitao, 36, is a former railway station operations director.
"Call us train fanatics," said Liu, a native of Mianyang city of Southwest China's Sichuan Province. "We are just crazy about trains."
"I was amazed when I received my first letter from a high school student, obsessed about trains and coaches," Liu said.
The train enthusiasts share their photographs of trains and their journeys through blogging, forum-postings and online chatting.
They also organize trips together. Last July 1 when the Qinghai-Tibet Railway was launched, several enthusiasts boarded trains from three different departure cities - Beijing, Chengdu and Xining.
They uploaded their photographs to the website to showcase the first rail journey to the highest plateau in the country.
Recently the website introduced online broadcasting programs by volunteers about the latest high-speed trains.
"The community is growing," Liu said. "I am glad that through this website, more people are seeing the value of the railways, their history and culture."
As for Farmer Liu, he buys updated train schedules each season, and looks for old ones from other enthusiasts.
"I don't read schedules to check times and destinations. I analyze them," he
said. "I study why and how train routes and their arrival-departure times are
arranged."
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