Having experienced the vagaries of CRH’s less than seamless service on the outward journey to Dandong, my expectations of smooth sailing (or should that be ‘railing’) on the return leg from Dalian to Tielingxi were less than sanguine❅. But would lightning really strike again on the return leg from our visit to the ‘dong’ part of Dong-Bei?

We didn’t have long to wait before the answer delivered itself. Because we wanted to get some ready cash before the trip to Tieling, we checked out of the hotel and got to the city railway terminus a good three hours shy of our intended departure time from Dalian (2:44pm) – all in good time to avoid any last minute gremlins or snags in the procedure. But again the viscititudes of CRM Rail raised its contrarian head to strike us another blow. Instead of just waltzing up to the ticket box to buy the tickets to Tieling (a simple transaction taking one hundred and twenty seconds) sabotage struck again! We found ourselves once again strait-jacketed by the omnipresent tentacles of the Chinese bureaucracy.

For reasons that I still can’t properly fathom (an incomprehensibility no doubt attenuated by my abysmal grasp of Chinese), we were not allowed to catch the Dalian train at 2:44. It appears to have had something to do with us not having the right coupons for gold tickets on the day of travel (this still doesn’t make sense to me!?!), was this the Chinese rail equivalent of the odds and evens days private motor vehicle system? Equally implausibly, it might also be due to our round trip being too short a duration, or if that proves to be not right, possibly because our round trip was too long! (whichever one best fits CRH’s current ticketing policy). Don’t ask me, I’m just transiting through! Either way, annoyingly, we were not permitted to take the train we wanted to take at the time we wanted to take it.

Instead, we had to make our way from Dalian Central to the northern station, Dalianbei and catch another train which wouldn’t leave for another six hours! Of course, even though we were at a railway station, we couldn’t take a train from Dalian to North Dalian to make the necessary connection (what a preposterous notion!). No, we were left to our own devices to hail down a taxi to take us to Dalianbei Station. Fortunately the rail company operation was still efficient and mindful enough to pocket our fare (¥400) while their ‘system’ was jerking us around for half a day?

By the time we got to the station and had run the gauntlet of the ticket and passport checks, and the body and luggage scans, we were still looking at the best part of a five, five-and-a-half hours wait for the 6:44pm to Tielingxi. When we had commenced our journey in Tieling a week-and-half earlier, I mentioned in the preceding site page that I had been ambushed, mugged and pummelled by a railway waiting seat. Here in Dalianbei I copped the same rough love treatment in what seemed like a “Groundhog Day” scenario. Within a few minutes of sitting down I was on the receiving end of a very “hands-on” automated seat massage. Unlike Tieling West, the massage seat-cum-soulless torturer started gradually with three minute sessions of relatively mild punishment…but by about the eleventh or twelfth the crescendo of pain inflicted by the seat had reached the point where I was copping “the Full Monty” of punishment.

Why did I continue to subject myself to such a barrage of robotic elbowing and kneeing of all parts of my vertebrae? Well I did try shifting seats several times, only to find that the automated massager in those seats swing into action as well (arghh, it’s following me!!!) I suppose that I persisted in testing my pain threshold because I convinced myself it was somehow doing my back good (perhaps a sort of placebo effect?). Besides, thanks to CRH I had a lot of lag-time to kill, and what better way to pass a lengthy chunk of time than by getting repeatedly kneed and elbowed in the back of the ribs.

I tried to grab some ‘shut-eye’ during the long vigil waiting for our Tieling train, but the combined effects of the to-ing and fro-ing of the busy terminal and the determined efforts of my back massager denied me even a mini “Rip Van Winkle” moment.

Footnote: To gain a bit of respite from the phalanx of massage seats, I wasted some time walking the interior four walls of North Dalian train station. It was cavernous in scope (making Tielingxi station look insignificance and starkly minimalist by contrast), it was equipped with two levels of shops and all the pop techno-gadgets and other electronic indulges so craved by your average Chinese Millennial (such as can be seen below).

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❅ although I must concede that the (considerably shorter) Dandong to Dalian, leg of my Lianoning wanderings managed to go off without a hitch (leaving aside the initial efforts of a CRH employee to send us to the wrong carriage – unintentionally I think)