Book Train Tickets Online

The IRCTC or Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, is a subsidiary of the Indian Railways to which the Railways has outsourced its Internet booking operations. IRCTC, in turn, has awarded the application design and programming to Broadvision, which also maintains the system.

The entire setup is in Delhi, and the ticket-printing operations are also carried out in Delhi. The printed tickets are couriered
out. More courier destinations are being added as the system picks up load, and as the courier gears up for delivery.

Briefly, it is the existing PRS (Railway Passenger Reservation System) that has all the data and does the booking. The Internet system piggybacks on the PRS and provides an extra booking arm. No train or availability data is stored in the Internet system. They are all retrieved from the PRS system, live, against user queries. The booking is also done directly on the PRS system.

Let us see how the system works. Once you have created your login and entered your profile, you can start booking tickets. Currently, you are limited to four tickets per month, as a measure to keep middlemen out of the system. Once the user enters data into the Internet-booking system, that data is passed on as a query to the PRS system. A Corba Server in the Appserver invokes Corba services. These are Java methods that call Java native interface methods, which in turn call C++ methods.

These are, in turn, a client of RTR (Reliable Transaction Router). RTR, a fault tolerant messaging middleware by Compaq, is used to run distributed applications in a distributed environment. IT provides a C++ object oriented interface. The server for this C++ client runs on the PRS server. The PRS accepts data as text strings in a pre-specified format. The output of the query on the PRS is a C++ structure. This is parsed and converted into an XML string, which is displayed back to the user.

Once you enter your travel details in the Internet system and ask for a booking to be done, the information is passed on to the PRS system. The fare details are taken in by the Internet system and the fare is separately calculated at the Internet end. As a check, the fare calculated separately by the IRCTC (Internet) system and the PRS are tallied. If they do not tally, the transaction is aborted. If they tally, the courier charge (Rs 30 for sleeper class, Rs 50 for upper classes) is added and displayed to the user (a credit-card charge of 1.8% of the total is levied by the bank). For payment authorization, the user is handed over to the payment gateway. Once the payment gateway informs the IRCTC system that the payment is successful, it actually books the ticket on the PRS system. On successful transactions, both the payment gateway and the PRS gives the IRCTC system authorization codes. Plus, the PRS gives a PNR number. The PNR number and the IRCTC transaction id are presented to the user. The user can track the status of the status of ticket delivery based on either of these.

Once the booking has been done, the PRS authorization code goes to the printing stations. The printing stations are workstations that run both the PRS system and IRCTC system in different windows. For procedural reasons, these two are kept separate at the ticket printing stage. An operator manually copies the PRS authorization from the IRCTC system and pastes it on to the PRS system, which then prints the ticket. An admin module helps distribute this workload.

Printed tickets are sorted by city of delivery and put in envelopes. The courier comes in three times a day for collecting the tickets. The ticket details are provided to the courier in soft copy, against which he enters the corresponding airway bill numbers. You can track the progress of the ticket from a link provided at the bottom right of the home page, by entering the PNR number. Local contact details of the courier are also provided.

So, how has the system delivered? Work started in April this year and the system was inaugurated on 3 September, in six months. As I am writing this, bookings online average from a thousand to thousand two hundred a day, much more than what many brick and mortar booking centers do. Incidentally, the system is not live 24 hours. It starts at 8 am along with the PRS centers, and shuts down with them at 10 pm. It is to the credit of the people behind the Internet system that they were able to extend booking ours across the country from 8 pm to 10 pm. This was done to facilitate Internet booking after you reach home back from work.

Currently, deliveries are on at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Cacutta and Hyderabad. As you read this, Ahmedabad, Vadodra and Pune should have been added. More cities are on the anvil. The App Servers are designed to take up to ten thousand transactions, before more have to be added. As volume goes up, there are plans to open printing centers in other locations.

No more of those long waits to book a rail ticket back home. 

Krishna Kumar