Train Ticket Booking- Indian Railways passengers are soon going to experience ticket booking like never before. Now the time is coming when the wait for “loading…” on IRCTC website will end and confirmed tickets will be available in the blink of an eye. Railways is bringing such a ‘Maha-upgrade’ in its existing Passenger Reservation System (PRS), which will increase the speed of ticket booking four times the current capacity.
Currently, the PRS system is able to book about 25 thousand tickets per minute, but after the upgrade, this number will increase to one lakh tickets per minute. This means that even during festivals, summer holidays or any peak season, you will not face the same problem in ticket booking as before.
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav told Parliament that the Railways is completely restructuring the PRS through the Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS). In this, hardware, software, network equipment and security infrastructure will be completely changed. The new system will be based on the latest cloud technology, which will be more feature-rich and high-speed. The current PRS was implemented in 2010 and runs on Itanium Server and Open VMS. In view of technical changes and increasing passenger pressure, it became necessary to upgrade it.
Railways has reduced the Advance Reservation Period (ARP) to 60 days from 1 November 2024, which was earlier 120 days. Its purpose is to reduce ticket cancellations due to unforeseen events. Apart from this, Railways has recently launched the ‘RailOne’ app, through which passengers can book both reserved and unreserved tickets on mobile phones.
Facilities will also increase in ordinary coaches
The percentage of non-AC coaches has been increased to about 70% and a target has been set to manufacture 17,000 extra general and sleeper coaches in the next 5 years. In the last financial year 2024-25 itself, 1,250 general coaches have been added to long distance trains.