Passengers swarm into a train station in Hefei, the capital city of East China's Anhui province, on Saturday Feb 19, 2010. As the traditional Spring Festival drew to an end on Thursday, a new wave of post-holiday travel rush is testing China's railway system, all over again. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - As the traditional Spring Festival season ended two days ago, a new wave of post-holiday travel rush came to China's railway system, the Ministry of Railways (MOR) said Saturday.

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According to a statement from the MOR, the nation's railways carried 6.49 million passengers on Friday, the first day after the Lantern Festival which ended the festival season.

The new wave of passengers mainly included students going back to school for the new semester and migrant workers returning to cities to start work. On Friday alone, 919,000 student passenger trips were made on railways, said the MOR.

The ministry expected the travel volume and duration of the new peak to be similar to the previous year, with an average of more than 6 million railway passenger trips a daily.

The MOR figures also showed that 166 million trips were made on railways since the Spring Festival travel rush began on January 19, up 6 percent from the same period last year.

A man shoulders his luggage near a train station in Nanchang, the capital city of East China's Jiangxi province, on Saturday Feb 19, 2010. [Photo/Xinhua]