eRail.in – Get Indian Railway Train Information Faster & Easier
Posted by Sree Pillai on December 16th, 2007 under category Internet
Topics: India, Railway, Ticket, Web 2.0
Indian Railways is one of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world, transporting sixteen million passengers and more than one million tonnes of freight daily.Indian Railway is the world’s largest commercial or utility employer, with more than 1.6 million employees. Good!
Have you seen Indian Railway Website? It has one of the worst user interface and user experience. The website has a lot advertisements, and all are image ads too! The same case with its divisional websites, for example see Southern Railway website.
Many of the railway websites are developed and maintained by CRIS (Centre for Railway Information System), an organization under Indian Railways. I don’t understand why would someone put ads in those sites? I doubts that the ads are put by some employees of CRIS and earning money in their pocket! I don’t think railway really need to go for website ads for making it profitable!
CRIS also maintains websites for Railway Ministry, IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation website for online railway reservation) and Train Running Information.
Vimal Kumar individually has developed an AJAX based simple and very effective interface for getting Indian Railway Express train information in a single window. Check out his innovation at eRail.in. You can find trains between two stations, time table, schedule, fare, PNR status, train route, seat availability, distance between stations, fare, halting stations, arrival and departure timing, running status, and much more can be checked on eRail.in.
Vimal promises to add more tools to help travelers to make faster decisions. The data for the site is provided by indianrail.gov.in
Using the same interface you can get PNR status and train number details. For the search, you can select major stations from the dropdown list or directly enter the station code. Just by a single click you can get details of the return trip also. eRail also provided Google Map mashup for the train route. From within the user interface, you can get the ticket availability for a particular train with a click. You can select date of travel from the calendar module, select class and type from the dropdown list.
The eRail interface will surely help you to make your railway travel decisions much faster. Then you can logon to IRCTC for booking your ticket.
It would have been great if clicking on a link in eRail.in can take me directly to the booking website with all information filled. But IRCTC website wants me to login first in order to get to the next pages. Why don’t CRIS employ smart people like Vimal and make better websites?!
Have you used Indian Railway website or IRCTC for booking your tickets? How easy was it? How do you find eRail.in?
14 Responses to “eRail.in – Get Indian Railway Train Information Faster & Easier”
Leave a Reply
Author Email: sree@teck.in
Kindly tell me that we had done group reservations in the month of mar and apr 2008. My questions is can we get a reservation data or proof for that now as we require that because we have lost the used tickets.
I booked a e-ticket to MUZAFFARPUR (mfp) to NEW DELHI (ndls) on the date of 17th of December, 2009, but that time I do not take print out of the ticket.
And irctc do not send the copy of e-ticket to my e-mail id.
I want to you Please send the copy of that e-ticket to my e-mail id.
The details of the E-Ticket:-
Pnr Number - 6433631085 Transaction ID- 0168442277
Train No - 2553 Train Name- VAISHALI EXP
From Station- MUZAFFARPUR JN(MFP) To Station- NEW DELHI(NDLS)
Date- 09/1/2010 Class- SL
Boarding- MUZAFFARPUR JN(MFP)
Name Age Sex
Rohit Kumar 24 Male
Please send the copy of the above e-ticket to my email id (sunnykr_muz@yahoo.co.in) and (mbarohitkumar@gmail.com).
I look forward from your side soon.
Thanks
Rahul
Really thanks you all plp for such great job done by you all,this site bcome very useful to me as being a travel agent i organise trip’s of my client’s very easily such as i get information on finger tips.
Well, you are doing a great job Vimal. The Indian Railway site is bull shit. You can’t simply use it because it is useless. I wonder if CRIS should be shown way to dust bin and guys like you put in place to make official web site indeed user friendly.
hi
thanks for starting erail again please do it continuis for eveer real it helps me much better and fast than other website please do continue it thank mr pillai again u r haresh
This is a wonderful site. I have been using for almost six months after locating this site from Google search. I was also not aware one could send comment on this. Now I located the forum and hence my hearty congratulations for the inventor.
The official website has lot of pop-ups and advertisement which make the user uncomfortable. This site does not show the passenger and express train which do not have a reservation coach. Here a user must know the train name or number and also station code without this information he cannot search the trains. they have given the link for searching the station code but if the user does not know the correct spelling of the station name he cannot get the station code. one more think is for each entry you will have to go to get it from separate page. if you does not know the date of running of the train then also you are not able to search the trains.
http://www.indiantrains.org/
The better way to search Indian trains looks great and it open fast, no pop-up, user friendly. The most important features i have seen in this site that if the user does not know the station code then also he can see all the trains and it is only website which have a drop menu box for the important station from where you can choose the station name and also it has a date calendar from you can choose the date and it show the running day of the train so that you can know which day of the week this train is running. This site will enable the users to search train route and compare fares of most of the trains in India.
erail site is very fast, user friendly and very easy to search and get all the information you need in very short time.
I was surprised to know that this is done by an Individual and not the railways department. A big salute to Mr. Vimal Kumar. Railways should reward him.
I want to know is this subsidary to indian railway or doing it on your own,and is there any possibility of doing business with erail.in,If yes please revert me, i am very much intersted to start a reservation counter.
erail is the most user friendly site i have seen. Fantastic job Vimal.
This is a very informative session you have strarted .I am proud that Indian people are making use of information for right purposes.
thanking you&with regards
Totally, this is a great link. Really well build app. I wish someone could do the same to IRCTC. It is really shameful. They are losing so much potential, but I guess when every train is sold out, it hardly matters. Still, the ability to safely and quickly book online would cut costs and lines hugely at the station.
its working for me in firefox 3b1. eRail is now in beta.
Lovely and thanks for the pointer. Thanks to Vimal. Bookemarked already. I think it is not yet ready for firefox. Initially I thought it is not working but when I tried in IE. It rocks. Still needs to test.