The students - from the nearby university - had brought chairs: rolling office chairs, wooden stools, and folding chairs, and were set up outside the locked door of the travel agency. Some of them had drinks and were chatting amiably.

Upstairs, at the internet cafe check-in counter, one-after-one came up to ask how much it would cost to stay in the cafe the whole night. "Train tickets go on sale at 9am," a young man with a square haircut and dark-rimmed glasses told me. He had to find a way to pass the night and still be downstairs early enough to get a good place in the queue.

The students in the lobby were waiting to buy train tickets home for the Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year (chunjie, literally "Spring Festival" in Chinese) is a time for families to get together. It is the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar, with special emphasis placed on the New Year's Eve dinner. Over two billion trips are taken within China during the month around Spring Festival, most are people scrambling to get home.

The great majority of this movement is done by train. Air travel is still too expensive for most middle class families and busses are slow and uncomfortable. Extra trains go out for the holiday period - but only so many trains can fit on the rails.

"It wasn't till my third day of waiting in line that I got a ticket," said Mr Zhang, a 34-year-old safety inspector at a small oil company. He is sitting by his bags outside Beijing Station. A bright red gift box stands next to his feet. "I waited three or four hours the first two days and both times the result was the same: they were all gone."

China's rail system is still not set up to take reservations far in advance. Tickets are bought on a first-come-first-served basis after they hit the market. Expensive tickets for the first class cars go on sale ten days before departure. Those are out of reach for most people.

The cheaper tickets - hard beds, seats, or standing room only - come out at 9am four days before the train leaves. People line up outside travel agencies or at the train station and surge forward as soon as it's announced that tickets are on sale.

Because it is a race against every other sales window in the city there is no time for indecision. People who don't know what train they want are yelled at and sometimes pushed out of the way. Mr. Zhang's experience is very common: often you don't make it.

Sometimes you just take what you can get. "We tried twice to get tickets back to our hometown, Nantong, in Jiangsu. There is only one train per day so it was impossible." Mrs Yu, a 39-year-old insurance saleswoman, is travelling with her son and husband. "Finally we just bought a ticket to Shanghai. That's only two or three hours from our home. We can probably figure it out from there."

This year's ticket situation has been made even worse by freak snowstorms in central and southern China. The worst snow in 50 years was reported in some places. Many of the communities affected are not used to snow and lacked the equipment and the experience to deal with it effectively.

Power was lost to whole provinces and roads were shut down. Vegetable prices doubled in some places up north because southern produce was nearly unavailable. Eight-hundred-thousand passengers were stranded at Guangzhou Railway Station. In response, the Chinese government brought in 1.3 million soldiers and reservists to help with relief efforts.

"I went to the train station four times," complains A Sheng, a hairdresser from the southeastern province of Anhui. A Sheng's family, his brother and parents, put him in charge of buying the tickets home this year. The family runs a restaurant in Beijing, but travels home to be with their relatives for the new year. "I stayed up all night two nights in a row trying to be at the front of the line, but still nothing. I slept three hours over two days."

A Sheng doesn't solely blame the snow, though. Mostly he finds fault in 'scalpers'. "They have connections and buy most of the tickets as soon as they come out. Then they sell them off at double the price."

Scalpers are a widely recognized problem, and in recent years the government has moved to combat it, but scalping is still widespread. China's tickets are far from forge-proof, and for many people there are no other available tickets.

But the same connections that A Sheng moans about are a boon to others. China is a society that places emphasis on relationships and many people get their tickets through connections, from friends of friends.

"We know people," a woman named Sun says, smiling. She is waiting outside for her tickets to arrive. I was asking people about their ticket stories when I ran into her and her friend. "Our story is very simple," she beamed. "Our friends work for the rail system. They can get tickets for any train, any time."

One year, I foolishly decided to join the Spring Festival migration myself. I was cold and I wanted to see the South. My friend Masa and I queued up two hours before the tickets came out.

There were about 25 people ahead of us. As the ticket windows opened, the crowd surged foward. When we reached the window, we were told we couldn't get a ticket to Shenzhen (the big city across the bay from Hong Kong). The best they could do was a ticket to go just two stops on a local train going that way, which would get to Shenzhen twenty hours later.

"Once you're on the train they can't kick you off," the ticket vendor shouted at us. "You want the tickets or not?"

We took them. The train left at midnight. At one-thirty in the morning we were roused from our beds and, after explaining our situation, sold standing room only tickets. We were hustled down to the dining car to join the other people with nowhere to go.

The dining car was filled with the travelling hopeless. Middle-aged men sleeping face down on the tables, students squatting in the aisles, avoiding the dining car floor - stained grey in some places, wet and squishy in others. We moved into the corridor at the back of the car.

For the next six hours, we chatted with Chinese students telling them Masa was from Hong Kong (he's Japanese, but doesn't like to tell people in China) squatting when our knees hurt, standing when our thighs burned.

At eight in the morning, a conductor came into the car yelling for everyone to clear out. "Sorry guys, we've got to get this place ready for breakfast." Then the conductor yelled something we'd been waiting for: "There are tickets available now. Anybody who wants to upgrade, come this way."

Masa and I pushed forward expectantly - dreaming of warm, white mattresses. What struck me though, is how many of the people who had waited with us - sleeping on plastic tables, squishing droopy faces against metal door frames - just drifted to the doorways, dazed, ready to stand for hours in another, more crowded, car.

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It's New Year here. It was a war-zone last night - the most happy and fun war-zone ever. Tonight the old guys in my apartment complex (the slightly drunk middle-aged guys, I should say) stopped me as I was coming out to the cafe to finish up this piece and send it off.

They say that I don't understand Spring Festival. "You can't write during Spring Festival," they yelled, slapping me on the back.

"There's no writing during Spring Festival. You're missing the whole point. You have to be meeting with your friends every night. Meeting up and drinking! It's like your Christmas!"

I told them they are slightly mistaken about how Christmas works. "Ok, it's like a crazier Christmas," they shouted. Then they made me shoot off really big fireworks. I love holidays!

Michael Armstrong is sweeble's Beijing correspondent