Yesterday was the final day China Railway still allowed paper tickets to be printed as reimbursement vouchers. I bought a ticket for G2317 from Jinhua South to Jinhua, took the train, and printed what became the last China Railway ticket in my collection.
After pulling everything out and counting them one by one, I found I had 278 tickets in total. Sorted by year, they look like this:
2010 1
2015 8
2016 8
2017 12
2018 30
2019 43
2020 24
2021 22
2022 9
2023 34
2024 46
2025 41
Of course, that number does not equal the actual number of times I traveled by train. I only started deliberately keeping China Railway tickets in 2015. Before that, I had already taken plenty of trains for trips back to my hometown and for travel. And during university, I also redeemed some tickets with points; those points tickets could not be printed as reimbursement vouchers.
The lone 2010 ticket, from Hangzhou to Jinhua West—later renamed simply Jinhua—turned up by accident this year while I was searching for something at home. I was 10 at the time. The father of one of my close friends happened to have a work-sponsored leisure trip to Hangzhou, so he brought both me and my friend along. On the way there, he only had one ticket, and since it was the National Day holiday, he took the two of us onto the train without tickets. I still remember working through a bunch of past NOIP preliminary contest papers during the ride, even though I still failed to pass the preliminary round that year. These days, fare-dodging is nowhere near that easy, which makes it a pretty funny memory to look back on.
The year-by-year numbers also reveal a few things.
I entered high school in 2015, and for the most part I only went out during summer vacation, either traveling with friends or attending events. But in 2017 I got pulled into FRC, and suddenly there were many more train rides because of competitions. The same was true in 2018. In just the second half of my senior year alone, there were 14 tickets, all from traveling out for competitions. I basically stopped studying altogether ~~which is why I ended up at a third-tier college~~. Back then, universities in China did not really consider awards from this competition during admissions. Even though our team won the national championship and made it to the world championship, none of that helped my college applications in any practical way. Still, the competition brought a lot of joy to a version of me who was anxious at the time, and maybe even depressed.
After I got to university, my schedule became much freer. I often traveled back and forth between Wenzhou and Shanghai to loaf around at a company, or went to Hangzhou to meet old classmates for meals and aimless walks. That is how 2019 ended up with 43 tickets. Then 2020 and 2021 each fell to about half of 2019, and 2022 dropped even further, down to a number close to my first year of high school. What happened during those years hardly needs explaining.
When I flip through this stack of tickets, each familiar station name and train number brings back its own piece of memory and emotion. The excitement of going to see someone I loved, the reluctance of parting, the anticipation of moving to another city, the nerves of applying for a U.S. visa, the relief of finally escaping a Shanghai that had trapped me for two months, the ease of traveling with friends—so much of it remains sealed inside those little red and blue slips of paper, waiting to surface again when I turn to the right one.