XI'AN: Overnight train from Beijing

Monday November 19

A man with a weathered face and wind-swept hair pushed past carrying a huge bag of grain balanced on his shoulder to my left.

On the other side, a smartly dressed cleanshaven young man pulled a suitcase with wheels through the crowd.

Getting a train in China is nothing like hopping on a cross country service in Britain.

These stations are a place where the poor who work selling on the streets rub shoulders with their urban middle-class and wealthy comrades in Beijing.

They are overcrowded, bustling and messy at every hour of the day.

Dozens of vendors try and sell you food, drink, clothes and souvenirs in what resembles a very chaotic airport's duty free.

In a country so large, the sprawling hubs are needed to move China's 1.3 billion people around.

As we arrived at one of the capital's three main stations for our first overnight service there was a huge crowd of people outside.

Busy: Crowds of people outside Xi'an train station when we arrived in the early morning

Beijing West is as big as most airports in Britain. In China the railways are expanding rapidly with hundreds of miles of new track rolling out across this enormous country every year as the country enjoys surging economic growth.

With our backpacks and overnight bags we pushed our way through to the x-ray machines and metal detectors.

Before our trip we had been warned about India's chaotic railway stations. But whatever that country throws at us, I expect these will be considerably worse.

We stood in an enormous waiting room as big as a football pitch after arriving early for our overnight train to Xi'an.

Every inch of floor space seemed to have been taken by Chinese travellers.

Finally we were called to the platform where our Soviet-era T-class sleeper train waited. It must have been at least 15 carriages long.

We had booked first class luxury soft sleeper seats. £43 got us a skinny top bunk bed in a four-person compartment which was no more than two metres wide and two metres deep.

There was room to stash our large bags at the end of the beds.

A Chinese couple who spoke not a word of English but were friendly had the bottom two bunks.

As the train pulled out of Beijing, our compartment stank of cigarette smoke from the communal corridor. Knowing sleep might not come easy we settled down for the night early and drifted off into an uneasy slumber, trying to ignore the sudden jolts.

We both slept in fits and starts throughout - although considerably better than we expected.

Bizarrely, the Chinese couple got up at 4am to have a chat and eat a very early morning noodle breakfast.

Five hours later, after a painfully slow 12 hour overnight journey, we were in Xi'an.

Our hair messy from a night of uneasy sleep, our teeth unbrushed and our bellies empty we emerged from the train and into China's smog.

Chaotic, slow but surprisingly comfortable, we were through our first overnight journey.