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-   -   Indian Railways Thread | Info, Queries & Reviews (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/commercial-vehicles/36752-indian-railways-thread-info-queries-reviews-37.html)

Use credit card, is always faster. Especially Citibank response I have found quite good.

I think IRCTC now also has some wallet facility where you can preload cash into it, I havent tried it but I guess this will help during Tatkal.

http://www.thestatesman.net/news/404...et-scheme.html

IRCTC I think considers all such facilities as "unfairly favouring online users" and hence disallows them all. Even the Quick Book facility is disabled during Tatkal hours (8 AM to 12 noon). Quite regressive of IRCTC, in my opinion.

It is not allowed to be used for Tatkal bookings.

There are so many unnecessary bottle-necks in the online booking process that could be thrown away to make it a better user-experience than the crap it is today.
For starters, they could allow the currently blocked QuickBook function which itself will avoid the need to unnecessary trawl through multiple pages.
Since anyone can use it, it is a level playing field too. Fill all details including payment option in just one page, move to payment portal, pay and get back. Instead of the multiple pages one has to go through in the PlanMyTravel mode.

Just noticed another bottleneck. :Frustrati

Citibank has been removed from both netbanking and debit card payment options. (credit cards should be still fine I guess!)

SBI netbanking, debit card etc is also not available for some days now - they mention this is due to some issue at bank's end (not an irctc issue). Possibly similar case with Citi.

How do travel agents able to book a tatkal ticket almost always when on our own we all struggle with booking even one. That too when I am using a high speed broadband connection which will surely be faster than the travel agent's connection. I have never been able to figure that out. Out of the 10 times or so when I have tried booking a tatkal ticket, I have been successful only 5 times. The agent though has never failed.

Here is one way: http://freepressjournal.in/touts-tur...m-rly-tickets/

(The arrests are genuine, but the technical details in the article don't appear to me are)

Having used national train booking websites at many countries I can happily say that IRCTC is one of the better ones, if not the best.

The best were Switzerland, UK, Sweden, Denmark... China, Thailand, Malaysia utterly hopeless.


Sent from my iPhone using Team-BHP

^^^True. Except for the "Tatkal" part (which has lots of room for improvement), the site, layout, user-experience is pretty good.
And this comes from someone who has booked return tickets for almost every weekend for the past 6 odd years. :)

P.S.: A rough calculation shows that the money I spent on tickets over these years could have easily got me a Ninja 300. :)

What is the logic behind allocating seats? I am booking tickets for two in a second seating train (Mumbai Pune). First I booked giving both seat choice as window, so I got one window and one third seat. I booked another ticket, giving one seat choice as window, and other as no preference, still one window and one third seat! And the train has more than 350 seats available!

What is the magic combo of getting two seats next to each other, or atleast getting a second seat and a window some space apart?

A couple of times last year, I had given 'no preference' for both, to get consecutive seats. Don't remember why I have not given a combination of 'window' and 'no preference'.

Passenger fares hiked. :(

Government raises rail passenger fares hiked by 14.2%, freight rates by 6.5%

How much time does it usually take to reflect the hike in the IRCTC site? I've checked yesterday and it still was not revised.

Can I book 2 out of 6 people on a ticket, to board from a different station than the others? Or does the boarding station for all have to be same on a single ticket? Same with destination on return?

AFAIK, this is not possible. All the passengers have to board from one station.

I had a similar requirement while booking a ticket for 2 pax. I had to book the tickets separately. Luckily, we got the tickets in the same double-decker compartment - one on the top and the other seated at the bottom.

Please reconfirm regardless of my opinion though.