I heard that 'there's a china eastern airline counter where you can buy train and airtickets inside this tomson centre along ZhangYang Road adjacent to Pucheng Road & PuMing Road' LIES! I went and asked the lady at the counter and she said 'No'.
Mind you this guy is a little more helpful on the whole topic of buying train tickets.
Anyhoo...I went off to the station itself and to the HUGE ticketing office [lian ge shou piao chu - 联合售票处] which lies at the corner of Meiyuan Road [梅园路] and Moling Road [秣陵路]. Which is just a big hall with a line of windows on one side and long queues of people trying to buy tickets, there is meant to be a queue for foreigners but I didn't immediately see one. I waited about 20mins in a queue to be confused by the lady behind the counter - i think each counter only sells specific types of tickets - there seemed to be particular queues for slow trains, rapids and expresses. So, I went to a different queue where I finally bought 2 tickets to Nanjing (cost 146RMB per single ticket, train takes 2 hrs to get there and leaves from Shanghai Hong Qiao Railway Station [上海虹桥火车站]). After all the bustle of the ticket hall I passed some funky ticket machines - which it turns out are much simpler to use to book your tickets and have a choice of an english menu (huzzah!). Although I must point out that I only saw the route for Nanjing (and all the stations in between there and Shanghai) on the screen and I didn't check if you could book other routes on it.
How to get to the magic ticket machines? Well from Line 1 metro station, head towards Exit 1
the entrance to the small shopping alley
walk to the end of the small shop lined corridor, then at the end face right and go up the stairs to ground level. Once at ground level (at least one of) the ticket vending machine hall(s) [自助售票处] is on the right.
Entrance to the ticket vending machine hall
Magic ticket machines with English
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