clinic and other facilities. Installed on the roof of the Station House were two marble clock faces and every morning from 7am to 9pm the bell sounded punctually and "The East Is Red song is played out. The Beijing station equipment was considered to be relatively advanced at its -time with four AC2-59 type escalators installed in the interior; the joint design and production of the escalators were coordinated by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai Elevator Company. The four sets of escalators were replaced during the 1980 and again during 1990; the most recent replacement of the elevators occurred in early 2005 - the design being a product of Otis Company. Operation China Railway After the completion of the new Beijing railway station, its transport capacity far exceeded the formerly used East railway station and it played an increasing role in heavy transport tasks, and today it is still Beijing's most important passenger railway station, and has the largest station traffic in China. The number of trains and traffic has also increased year by year: In 1959 there were 33 train lines; in 1966 there were forty train lines; in 1978 there were sixty-one train lines; in 1985 there were seventy-eight train lines; and by 1993 there were eighty-two train lines. During the late 1950s, the number of passengers using the railway transportation system was six million people a year, in the late 1960 it was eight million people a year, in the late 1970 it reached fifteen million a year, and after the Chinese economic reform period, the usage soared to more than thirty million people. To alleviate the transport pressure on the Beijing railway station, the Beijing Municipal Government and the Ministry of Railways in 1980 started the planning and construction of Beijing's second passenger station and hence the Beijing West railway station was completed in 1996, which provided transportation links for the Beijing–Guangzhou Railway and Beijing–Kowloon Railway helped alleviate pressure on the Beijing railway station - this led to a reduction in passenger traffic for the Beijing railway station to twenty million people. Since 1976, the Beijing railway station had begun a series of upgrades to the passenger service facilities, for example a computer system had been set up for processing tickets, a TV monitoring screen, wireless communication, automatic broadcasting system, and extensions made to the railway platform expanded its length from 497 to 603