Train tickets
 

We are travelling to Fujian province soon. We have booked train tickets from Wuyi Shan to Xiamen. We booked the tickets through Ctrip. We just wonder if it is going to be difficult to navigate to find the Ctrip office to pick up the tickets.
Can this be done at any railway station in China? e.g. can we pick them up in Beijing?
Thanks!

You don't pick the tickets up at a "Ctrip office." You pick them up at the ticket office in a train station. Initially, many stations had a separate window for picking up tickets, but now you can pick them up at any window selling tickets. No reason to say anything: just hand your passport over with a slip of paper on which you've written the confirmation number you received. If picking up tickets for more than yourself, you'll need the passports of the others, too.

Yes, you can pick the tickets up at any train station ticket office, but you'll pay a 5RMB service charge per ticket if you pick the tickets up at a station other than Wuyi Shan.

Are off site ticket offices back in play for pickups yet? (I much prefer them to train stations.)

As I do not have a Chinese ID, I have to pick up my train tickets at a train station window. I don't know if there are Ctrip sites at the stations, but I haven't noticed any.

I usually arrive at the train station 90 minutes ahead of departure to pick up tickets in case I need to wait in line for an hour. I also usually pick up all my other tickets at the same time (at RMB5 per off-site pickup).

Many thanks folks!

If you have booked it with the ctrip app, you´ll receive a confirmation message on your phone with all the booking details in chinese.

Easy to handle too as you just have to show it at the ticket window.

The text with the confirmation number alone is not enough. You also need your passport.

(Myself, I find it easier to hand a slip of paper through the window instead of bringing out my phone/tablet, given all the bumping and such in line.)

+1. Missed a train in Sanya because of this (and an incompetent ticket agent).

How long you might have to wait is so unpredictable these days that I go for a separate trip to pick up the ticket. (Though at Beijing West South there is a separate window if you're picking up a ticket for a soon-to-depart train.) Remember, you can pick the ticket up at any train station in the departure city without paying the 5RMB fee. Remember, too, that ticket issuance stops 15 to 30 minutes before departure, depending on the station. Ticket checking also stops about 10 minutes before departure, again depending on the station.

Wrt ticket checking, I've boarded many trains inside of t-10, sometimes with just a minute to spare.

Well, you're lucky then. Or you know the secret hand signal.

I've been locked out with plenty of time left to reach the train. (We're talking about ticket checking, not boarding.)

Again, enforcement no doubt varies by station.

Yes, as in putting your (blue) ticket into the entry gate or showing your (red) ticket to the lady who stands next to the entry gate. My experience is mostly limited to Shanghai departures (the subways are predictable/reliable so I am comfortable optimizing in order to minimize time wasted in the train stations).

Just for others reading this, in many if not most Chinese train stations it can be quite a hike from ticket checking to your actual train carriage, especially if it's at the far end of the platform. One or two minutes would rarely be enough.

FWIW, there are now a handful of ticket collection machines that do accept foreign passports and some other less common IDs:

A few photos: https://i.imgur.com/net41HP.jpg, https://i.imgur.com/AS4qrOq.jpg

Where was that photo taken? I thought I saw a machine that would take passports last week at Beijing West -- it had instructions in English, strangely -- but I couldn't see how to get it started or where to put the passport.