How to understand the Indian Railways from abroad?

score:7

Accepted answer

I actually almost answered this question in your other question :).

Simply put, Indian railways has a very very powerful backend development team (their reservations were running fine with a cross country network when internet was still unheard of), however their front-end team is amateur at best. IRCTC which is a reasonably good portal is not owned and operated by Indian Railways, this allows you to reserve your train tickets.

However, your answer has to be erail.in, they use the data from Indian Railways website and so they are reliable (99% of the times, but its easy to double check once you zone in on a specific route from the official site). They use google maps to demonstrate travel routes, show fares for each class, even link to live train arrival and departure, all using a simple ajax based interface. You just need to know the places you are going to and you are good to go.

Finally, Rome2Rio is surprisingly good for travel in India, when they introduced their services (probably 4 years ago) the first test I did was from a remote village (where I worked with Indian Railways) where the only mode of transport is a train and they had spot on results, I have been shocked by their accuracy many times (including while trying to answer your previous question about Sambalpur).

Upvote:4

For a huge network of trains, it is possibly difficult(not impossible) to store all the data online and for this reason, Ministry of Railways in India has been publishing a book yearly called 'Trains at a Glance'. While this book is easily available at kiosks in India, there is luckily a pdf version available on the website of the Ministry:

Trains at a Glance

To read this you have to figure out a route which is mostly the two most important stations between which you want to explore connections. While it could be tricky, by using a map like this could help you

Indian Railway Map

You can find a valid route name, which will help you arrive at a Table number in Trains at a Glance.

Once you have the number say T-97, you get a beautiful page with all the possible train numbers and their timings, listing down all the stations that fall enroute. Once you have the train number you can use google to check the entire schedule of that train.

Sample Route Table

This might be tricky, but this book is time and tested. It helps or rather used to help a lot of people in India who do not have access to the internet. And the fact that my dad's team works on it makes me more proud of it!! :)

More post

Search Posts

Related post