Team-BHP - Indian Railways Thread | Info, Queries & Reviews

Quote:

Originally Posted by wildon (Post 2313139)

Here is my Tatkal booking experience today.

Till 7.54 a.m (irctc site timings)everything works superfast in irctc including quick book.
At 7.55 a.m (irctc site timings) quick option went down and got a message that " Quick book option not available from 8.00a.m to 9.00 a.m"

Gone to the "Plan My Travel" and got a message " Service not available" :Frustrati

At 8.05 a.m all Tatkal seats gone to the Waiting list mode. :deadhorse

Experienced the similar case many times.

08:00:55 - Ticket availability 62
08:01:40 - Availability 23 (After entering the passenger deatils)
08:03:13 - WL41 (After making payment):Frustrati
But finally got confirmed 2 hours before chart preparationclap:

Mine was even better.
At 8.00, 48 seats available in 3A.
At 8.01, WL 23.
I was shocked.
I am a seasoned player in this area but frankly I feel that this qualifies for a new record.

They have disabled QuickBook during the 1st hour of Tatkal opening (8 - 9AM) since some time now.

I had received an email forward about a blog-post where someone had used a Firefox add-on to accelerate the booking process (to ensure better hit-rate for Tatkal). Don't remember the details though - never bothered because I have been quite lucky in my attempts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wildon (Post 2313139)

Yesterday and today I managed to book onward and return tickets to hyderabad from bangalore in tatkal for my relative.

It first says service not available, but keep refreshing until the page opens and once it opens, don't click refresh, it takes some time, but it will work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.Boss (Post 2313182)

08:01:40 - Availability 23 (After entering the passenger deatils)
08:03:13 - WL41 (After making payment)

This should not be happening. Once passenger details are entered, the system is supposed to block the tickets till you make the payment. Obviously, some hanky panky is going on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wildon (Post 2313139)

Here is my Tatkal booking experience today.

Wildon, try doing this 3 days in a row, and you would be 100% assured of achieving a hatrick with the same result.

Its a harrowing time when booking tickets under tatkal. I knew that some mischief is bound to happen and same did happen with me as the page was unable to be refreshed. As if the page was stuck for some reason. Luckily had few friend and relatives trying simultaneously and finally could book the tickets through one of my relatives. Total help tried - 4 friends and 3 relatives and one gets lucky. I still remember the time of booking it was 8.02:30 am.
Had me sweating during those moments even in office AC

Quote:

Originally Posted by rishie

It first says service not available, but keep refreshing until the page opens

Exactly. F5 is your friend here. It works, as I know from experience. Even in those cases when you have made the payment, but the transistion from bank-website to IRCTC is taking an inordinately long time to complete (with the possibility of transaction timing out), I have succeeded by doing a Refresh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BaCkSeAtDrIVeR (Post 2313678)

This should not be happening. Once passenger details are entered, the system is supposed to block the tickets till you make the payment. Obviously, some hanky panky is going on.

It does not work like that. Happened to me many times. You see that there are seats available, you enter the details and make the payment and your ticket can end up in WL. Only thing what you can do is pray :Frustrati

Quote:

Originally Posted by BaCkSeAtDrIVeR (Post 2313678)

Once passenger details are entered, the system is supposed to block the tickets till you make the payment.

Thats not the way this system is designed. There is no concept of blocking. System simply does booking once payment is cleared.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NetfreakBombay (Post 2313732)

Thats not the way this system is designed. There is no concept of blocking. System simply does booking once payment is cleared.

Ya I too would second that.
Given the volume of parallel transactions vs the time it takes to do a payment clearance they would not block any record.
Everything is open for first come first serve. :D

In response to the numerous complaints about problems with Tatkal (~ 8 to 10 AM) booking, IRCTC seem to have taken the "easy" way out by just increasing the timeout intervals throughout the application.

As a result, in place of the repeated service unavailable / failure messages previously encountered, users now get a sense of the pages loading at a much slower speed. Obviously, while one's booking requests / payment confirmation messages are still being processed, others are booking tickets in the background. Hence, the massive difference between What you see (when you click the make payment button) and what you eventually get.

The right approach would actually be to scale up / down hardware on demand, but they don't seem ready for that exercise yet.

Ticket booking experience yesterday.

08:00:02 - www.irctc.co.in - Service not available - Refresh
08:00:07 - Login Page - Enter Login Credentials - Go
08:00:19 - Service not available - Refresh
08:00:40 - Plan my booking - Enter details - Find Trains
08:01:08 - Service not available - Refresh
08:01:15 - List displayed - Choose Train & Class
08:02:06 - Service not available - Refresh
08:02:18 - Available 114 - Book
08:02:51 - Service not available - Refresh
08:03:20 - Enter Passenger Details - Availability 97
08:03:43 - Payment Option - Select - Pay
08:04:22 - Amount debited - Pls wait
08:04:53 - Service not available:Shockked: - Refresh
08:05:20 - Time out - Relogin
08:06:03 to 08:09:40 - Same story! again amount debited & Login Time out

08:11:10 to 08:16:45 - Third attempt, thank God availability was 26 and finally got the ticket confirmed clap:

Lots of stories to share, not worth it but!

THE MOST FRUSTRATING SITE ON THE NET! I'm waiting for the loader to load in the Train Details and Availability as i'm writing this! :eek: