Train search blues !

Tired of waiting in those never ending queues for getting a train ticket? If you ever thought booking tickets on the net was a snap, you better think again. Let me relate my experience.

Firstly let me start off by saying that I simply admire the programming that has gone in to the railway reservation booking system. As a person who knows programming, I can just imagine the amount of work - read coding - that has gone into it. To remember everyone's queries and assign you in the queue for the same journey without ever duplicating and messing things up is tremendous to say the least. It is one huge and overwhelming task. Hats off to the people who created it. Mind blowing !

But somewhere along the line the creators of the 'official railway reservation website' overlooked a few things which makes it difficult to use. Let us take a simple case of looking up train timings. Say I want to travel from Bangalore to New Delhi. These are the steps that I would undertake assuming I don't know the train number or name.

Southern railway website

1. Click on Train Timings - Don't know the train name or number - 2. Come back to home page - 3. Click on Trains between Stations - Don't know the code - 4. Click on ' If you Don't Know the Station Code? Click Here' - 5. Enter the few characters of originating stations - 6. Choose Class and date and press 'Get it' - 7. Once you get the suggestion, choose the correct source and destination and press 'Get it' - Atlast you get which trains run on the selected date and their arrival and departure timings.

Erail.in

Compared to the above laborious procedure, it is very easy to obtain the same information on Erail.in

1. Just select your stations either in the main or all stations drop down box - 2. Select date - 3. Now click on 'trains Bangalore >> New Delhi' next to the drop down box and hey presto, you get all the trains that run between the two stations along with their timings and availability in each class !

Cleartrip

This website makes it even more simple.

1. Click on train search - 2. Fill in the starting and ending stations ( it will automatically suggest them) - 3. Fill in the date and class and press 'Search' and whoa, you have information on all the trains, fare, timings, duration etc.

Wasn't that absolutely great? There are some other features like a map for the route of any train on Erail and Cleartrip that makes them a delight to use. I just wish that the authorities or whoever designs a 'public' website takes note of these features and makes the common man's life much simpler. If you found these sites to be useful, refer them to others so that they too can benefit from them.