Smoker delays bullet trains

Smoking bans on bullet trains need to be strictly followed, railway officials urged passengers yesterday after three trains on the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed line were delayed due to alarms apparently set off by a smoker on train G1048, which was scheduled to leave for Wuhan at 2:50 pm Tuesday.

The train's operating system kept sounding error alarms, delaying its departure by nearly three hours.

"It took quite some time for machinists to figure out what was wrong," a spokeswoman of the Guangzhou Railway Group said yesterday.