'Our' Silk Road tour included two train trips - this six plus hours on a hard seat, and a second overnight trip in what was originally a soft sleeper that we had changed to a deluxe soft sleeper cabin. More on that later. We had also booked two high speed train trips through
China Travel Guide. As with Tour Beijing, the contact was constant with heaps of information and links to help us. They'd told me we could pick our tickets up at any station with a ticket office and after a little bit of confusion with the number the person tried to use to print the tickets, that's what I did.
Station
The late afternoon train to Jiayuguan was quite the experience, but again, not bad, just weird, and funny.
The train looked like something out of the 50s and it possibly was
They were certainly hard seats. Our actual seats were taken by the guy with the food/drinks trolley. We were told to sit wherever we wanted. We chose seats that got the most fan coverage but that eventually came to nothing when they switched the fans off about half way into the slow, and very warm, trip.
You couldn't even open the windows, to escape