I have been using the irctc website to book tickets for the past two years. Compared to the queueing up in front of the counters in reservation centers, this is really cool and useful. Forget about the days before computerization of railway reservation. People used to camp complete with bedding in front of the “Aarakshan Kendra” near Paharganj New Delhi, during those days, especially South Indians to get accommodation in South bound trains. There are still some functions which cannot be done thru the IRCTC website. One such is “telescopic ticketing”. Suppose I want to travel to Bikaner (Rajasthan) from Palakkad (Kerala). Using the railway reservation counter, I can book a ticket from Palakkad to Bikaner, with reservation from Palakkad to New Delhi by Kerala express. On the basis of the same ticket I can make a reservation for a train from Delhi to Bikaner, in the same counter. (I can make even a break of journey for some days in Delhi, depending upon the total kilometres I have travelled till then). The ticket charge is less than booking two different tickets, one from Palakkad to New Delhi and one from Delhi to Bikaner. The second ticket is just a “reservation ticket” with just the reservation charge specified in it and the train details of the second train. This is called telescopic charging, which is a good attraction for long distance travel in Indian Railways, especially if you will be travelling by two or more trains. Telescopic charges are applied even when you get an “extension ticket” while you are in the journey itself. Supposed you are travelling from Delhi to Chennai, and in the middle of the journey, say at Nagpur, you decided to extend your journey to Kanyakumari from Chennai. You can request the Train Superintendent or TTE to extend your NDLS-MAS ticket to Kanyakumari. The charges you have to pay will not be as much as a separate ticket from Chennai to Kanyakumari. I do not know how many of the general public in India know of this. As IRCTC prompts you to specify entraining and detraining stations and gives you a “radio button” choice for the trains from the starting to destination, you cannot do this type of ticketing. So it actually rakes in additional revenue for the railways. Another problem I encountered was that you cannot really choose your own train from one station to another while booking. It shows you a list of trains and asks you to choose by clicking on the radio button. For examples summer specials, festival specials do not find a place in the list. So actually the site controls the trains for which you can book in a given route. They must modify this page to accommodate the list as also a box to enter any train number, validate the train number and give a message if it does not travel in the given route. Really, I must not be cribbing. The service of IRCTC is really good. In metro cities you get the ticket the third day of your booking. I really do not mind the extra Rs.40 or so charged by them. Kudos to IRCTC. But they must improve and include all the functionalities which the railways do in “manual-counter” reservations. Really, a boon to Indians living overseas and come for vacation to India. They can do their bookings early while in their country giving their parents/relatives address for ticket delivery and enjoy their railway journeys while in India.
Updated: 18 Jan 07:Recently when I tried to book, ater the payment was done, connection to the reservation site failed. But within 24 hours the amount got refunded back to my card account!. Good..for an Indian company to refund money, that is great!!