Vinh railway station – an immemorial place?

To continue the series about my hometown, I would like to write a short article about Vinh train station. This idea popped out of my head when I was waiting for my train which rode me back to Hanoi after five days break.

Welcome to Vinh train station

As you already know, my hometown is located in the North Central of Vietnam which is a six-hour train ride from Hanoi capital. Vinh station is placed right on the North-to-South railway route. There are many beautiful and historical places of interest around the city such as Cua Lo beach. So it is obvious that the station generally got high visit frequency of passengers and packets, especially on holidays.

I am living in Hanoi which is in the Northern area, but actually the first time I have ever taken a train is heading to the South when I was at 11^th grade and went to Danang for joining the Youth Informatic Competition which is also an unforgetable memory.

The endless rail-lines to the North...

and to the South

By the time I had been there, the station was under reconstruction. As you can see in the first picture, the platform was being cluttered with building materials. The sightseeing may seem old but I am very proud to say that the railways services is way better than 10 years ago, unlike the slowly development in economy and technology of the city ☹ . First, it supports online buying tickets which helps me to save time and money. Second, the journey time from Hanoi to Vinh which I often takes nearly ten times per year is significantly reduced from 7.5 hours to 6 hours.

From my home, I can reach the station in 15 minutes by car or motorbike. At that day, I arrived in advance by half an hour to spend time freely walking around the place. The departure time was in the middle of the day, the station was not crowded so I can enjoy some silence moment. It was such a gloomy day and I am sure that it is definitely not the happiest day of my life when I was alone in the big platform, surrounded by several people were bearing a sad mark in their faces while saying goodbye to their relatives.

Once in a blue moon, a bad situation occurred. Because of heavy rain which is affected by a big storm hitting some Southern provinces, parts of rail line had been destructed. The repair had been completed in the morning. However, it still delayed my train number SE6 for 6 hours. Lucky for me, the receptionist suggested me to change the ticket to train number SE4, which had been late for 14 hours, would arrived Vinh station in 1 hour. Fortunately this train ran so quick on the remained journey and took only about 5 hours to reach the final destination, Hanoi. That is kind of record of the fastest moving time to me.

The train number SE4 was late for 14 hours because of a catastrophic railway damage

Hope to see Vinh again soon.