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Subway tragedy drives Beijing to near standstill

By Qin Zhongwei (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-18 08:06

Hundreds of thousands of rush-hour commuters in Beijing scrambled for an alternative route to work Friday morning after a man in his 20s ended his life on the tracks of the city's subway, a tragedy that caused chaos on all six subway lines.

Jia Peng, a spokesman with the Beijing Subway Company, said the man jumped in front of a moving train on Line 1 at Nanlishilu station at 8: 25 am.

Passengers inside the westbound train had to pry open doors to get off the train and were told to take buses or taxis to complete their journeys.

Service was suspended for around half an hour on Line 1 and that disruption impacted the other lines.

Heavy rain outside forced many commuters to shelter underground and wait for subway service to resume.

An official with the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communications, who would not give his name, said more people than usual were using the subway because heavy rain had convinced a lot of motorists to leave their cars at home.

Safety barriers and doors that are common to most Beijing subway stations have, so far, not been installed on Line 1. The line was the first built in Beijing and carried the most passengers. It is the busiest line of Beijing's mass transit rail network, running underneath Chang'an Avenue, the city's grand east-west thoroughfare. The line passes the Beijing CBD near the China World Trade Center.

Xinhua contributed to the story