Liao Ma still feels excited when talking about how the police in Chengdu, Sichuan province, helped her find her son and her hefty sum of money.

Before getting on an express train for neighboring Chongqing municipality in the Chengdu East Railway Station on the afternoon of Jan 6, Liao asked her four-year-old son Liao Mou to sit on two huge paper boxes with 160,000 yuan (US$25,397) when she went to the toilet.

While she lost the way in the spacious waiting hall, her son who had not seen her mom for quite a long time was scared, fearing she had deserted him and crying heartedly.

Learning what had happened, Zhang Jianwei, a police officer patrolling in the hall used his interphone to ask all his colleagues to pay attention to a middle-aged woman looking for her son.

As some colleagues were trying to find the whereabouts of the mother through the video surveillance system, Zhang and the others had an intensive search in the station and finally found the mother near its northern entrance.

Seeing her son safe and sound in the police duty room, Liao was so excited and said:“I thought you had been kidnapped with the money.”

She told police it was the first time she had visited the station, and she went to the wrong direction after answering the call of nature.

As she did not find her son and money, she thought he might have been kidnapped and went to the northern entrance to chase the “kidnappers.”

The money would cover the medical expenses of her ailing mother who was in hospital and would have an operation, Liao said.

Police escorted Liao and her son to the railway as she had a hefty sum in cash.

Each year, a few careless passengers lose money in railway stations. In some cases, the money involves hundreds of thousands of yuan, said Wang Wei, deputy chief of the Chengdu railway police.

Incomplete statistics show that police have retrieved more than 260,000 yuan in cash for absent-minded passengers in different railway stations under the administration of Chengdu Railway Administration in less than one month.

Late on the evening of Dec 29, a policeman patrolling in the Guangyaun Railway Station in the northernmost Sichuan city of Guangyuan found a black bag with 40,000 yuan in cash on the belt of the station’s checkpoint.

When he found its owner, the man in his 40s who had gotten on a train for Beijing did not know he had lost the bag because he had so much luggage.

On the morning of Jan 1, a Mr.Tan from the easternmost Sichuan city of Dazhou reached the Chengdu East Railway Station. Returning home, he found he had lost his bag with 54,700 yuan.

Just as Tan was pondering where he had lost the money, railway police called, asking him to take back the back in the station.

Police told him a conductor found his bag under a seat, and they found his cell phone number on a piece of paper in it.

On the afternoon of Jan 4, an old couple forgot to take back their bag with thousand of yuan after their luggage passed the checkpoint in the Deyang Railway Station in the northern Sichuan city of Deyang.

Thanks to the video surveillance system, police found the man who had taken away the bag with money for treating the 73-year-old husband’s coronary heart disease.

Wang appeals to passengers to take good care of their valuables during the Spring Festival travel rush when there are lots of passengers in each railway station and passengers have much luggage.