Train tickets

You didn't specify for wich day exactly did you look after the tickets. When I look now at China Highlights website ( https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/ ) for train tickets purchasing, there you can find available seats for your route.

OK, you have already bought the ticket to Luoyang. That's done. To be certain that you really get exact train and exact class that you want with at least 99.9% certainty, I really recommend that you use China Highlights. The reason is simple. They will accept your payment even before the ticket sale opens and they will do the purchase immediately as it opens. They really do everything to secure you a ticket and a commission for themselves, of course. Give them a try. I was really satisfied.

Thanks! That's what I was talking about, I site that lets you reserve in advance and buy when available. The tickets are for May 10th and indeed in China Highlights there are some available but in trip.com I can't find any. Anyway I'll use China Highlights for the next reservation.
Thanks again!

Some routes have very few tickets and sell out right away. Most trains out of Pingyao have this problem. The solution is to buy a ticket departing from another city. Ctrip provides no support snd can't help you figure this out. You need to use another agent with customer service. Also all agents accept order before tickets are released except ctrip. One thing about China Highlights is that they overcharge for sleeper trains.

Good to know. I've also checked the trains from Taiyuan, but since I cannot (or don't know how to) buy bus tickets from abroad and I would need a bus to go to Taiyuan (the trains were also sold out), I was worried that the bus tickets would sell out too and I would end up blocked in Pingyao, so I bought the sleeper through ctrip. I'll buy now the next ticket already through China Highlights, since it's not a sleeper.
Thanks!

I don't know where you got that 9:00 am figure. Is that when ctrip says it makes the tickets available?

What counts is when tickets are made available on the official 12306.cn site. It can be hard to figure this out, since it depends on the train, and probably changes over time (so only the most recent information counts). My guess is that there's a lag involved, and that those tickets were available on 12306 several hours, maybe even a day, before you could buy them on ctrip.

It's ctrip information, yes. If you look for any tickets for more than 30 days into the future it gives you a date and a time when they'll become available. For example if you try to buy tickets for May 11th from Luoyang to Xian it says they will be available tomorrow at 4PM China time. I've tried to look for the same tickets in other platforms and they don't give details about seats available and so on, so I guess it's right that the tickets are not available yet. I don't see a reason why ctrip wouldn't allow me to buy tickets if they're available, losing they're fee. But it could be that indeed the time is kind of a ballpark estimation and the tickets do become available before.
Or maybe you are right and the tickets are available first on 12306 and then to agencies. Anyway I cannot use 12306 so I'll have to trust China Highlights.

As I said, they are always fiddling with the ticket sale rules, always.

But according to this site, which may or may not be accurate or current, they now dribble tickets out every hour or half-hour on the ticket release day. So tickets may be sold out at 9am, but may be available again at 11am, for example. (Of course that's 12306, and ctrip may be different.)

http://huoche.8684.cn/331 (in Chinese)

By the way, there have been Chinese third-party apps out there which supposedly could grab tickets the second they became available, but they're viewed as very unsafe since you have to give the app your 12306 log-in and payment details.

Also, remember, that individual stations only have a limited amount of tickets allocated to them so there may very well not be any Pingyao to Luoyang tickets available but plenty of Taiyuan to Luoyang tickets up for grabs (And, yes, you can board the train in Pingyao).

Oh, I didn't know that. So once I find the train I want I could look for a ticket for the same train from any station before mine? Is that right?