12 replies to this topic

[CHamilton]

For the AUers who are interested in Indian Railways:

http://www.labnol.or...location/21125/

CRIS, the IT wing of Indian Railways, is beta testing an improved and clutter-free version of the Train Enquiry website that is far more useful than the existing one. The new website will not only provide the running status of trains but will also help you track the exact location of trains across the country.

[Texan Eagle]

For the AUers who are interested in Indian Railways:

http://www.labnol.or...location/21125/

CRIS, the IT wing of Indian Railways, is beta testing an improved and clutter-free version of the Train Enquiry website that is far more useful than the existing one. The new website will not only provide the running status of trains but will also help you track the exact location of trains across the country.

I am eagerly looking forward to see how much improved this new version will be. Even after all the improvements, train status will still be manually updated (similar to what Amtrak does now?) so the accuracy will not be 100%. A better tool than this site is the experimental tool called SIMRAN (acronym for Satellite Mapping and Ranging) that is being experimented on a few important trains currently and will be slowly expanded to cover all trains. It is based on direct signals collected from a GPS device on board the train so the position and speed of the train shown is bound to be quite accurate. Check it out-

http://simran.in/

[Devil's Advocate]

Amtrak engines already have GPS systems in use today. Unfortunately all you'll ever get out of this system is a basic geofence report if and when a given train passes by a regularly scheduled station. If anything at all gets out of whack the current system is apparently incapable of fixing itself or adjusting to reroutes. If Amtrak tried to provide more information then maybe the Department of Fatherland Security would be outraged at Amtrak's willingness to provide "secret" intelligence to "the enemy." Nevermind that you can already track virtually every commercial jet over American skies.

Edited by Texas Sunset, 07 April 2012 - 12:59 PM.

[Texan Eagle]

Amtrak engines already have GPS systems in use today. Unfortunately all you'll ever get out of this system is a basic geofence report if and when a given train passes by a regularly scheduled station. If anything at all gets out of whack the current system is apparently incapable of fixing itself or adjusting to reroutes. If Amtrak tried to provide more information then maybe the Department of Fatherland Security would be outraged at Amtrak's willingness to provide "secret" intelligence to "the enemy." Nevermind that you can already track virtually every commercial jet over American skies.

The SIMRAN project that I mentioned about is also stuck because the Indian equivalent of Department of Fatherland Security fears that terrorists will be able to find out where each train is exactly and accordingly plan attacks.. as if not knowing the GPS co-ordinates of trains have stopped them from attacking so far

Edited by Texan Eagle, 07 April 2012 - 02:27 PM.

[jis]

The airline location services apparently do not provide exact correct location on any public portal. The location info is provided with a random time lag, so at best one knows the rough location where the plane was a little while back. I have noticed the same on moving map displays within planes. Should not be that hard to do so for trains.

[caravanman]

Hi,

I find trying to reserve Indian trains from the UK quite problematic, apart from all the wierd adverts that accompany each new widow on the main website.
I was very happy with "Cleartrip" rail bookings for my last India trip, but understand that one now needs an "Indian" mobile phone number even to pre-register before trying to purchase... I wish things that are not broken would not get "fixed" !!!

Ed

[jis]

Hi,

I find trying to reserve Indian trains from the UK quite problematic, apart from all the wierd adverts that accompany each new widow on the main website.
I was very happy with "Cleartrip" rail bookings for my last India trip, but understand that one now needs an "Indian" mobile phone number even to pre-register before trying to purchase... I wish things that are not broken would not get "fixed" !!!

Ed

Yeah, I think it comes from IRCTC having placed that restriction. They have been working hard to make it harder to make reservations and buy tickets from abroad, and have been succeeding at it spectacularly I might add. These days I just have my sister do the honors for me sitting in India. Much easier than trying to jump through the hoops and run around the hamster wheels that IR throws our way. I do have an account using my sister's mobile phone and it works fine, but how many people are fortunate enough to have a railfan sister living in the right country?

[Devil's Advocate]

Why would they want to prevent people from buying tickets from abroad?

[jis]

Why would they want to prevent people from buying tickets from abroad?

I am not sure. Maybe Texan has better insight on this matter.

One possibility is that foreign sources were being used by scalpers to corner reservations in some sort of a scam, or they were facing significantly higher proportion of fraudulent CC charges from abroad. Before they took this step they had made it impossible to buy tickets using foreign Visa and Mastercards. Those cards had to be registered with an Indian verifier before they could be used. Amex was still open. And then they tightened the web membership requirement to require that the account be verified by sending a verification token by SMS to a +91 prefix mobile phone.

I hasten to add that this is just speculation on my part. The other possibility is simply that someone has a lot of free time to dream up new things to keep themselves gainfully employed, though having see the nature of this operation in close range I sort of doubt that.

[Texan Eagle]

Why would they want to prevent people from buying tickets from abroad?

I am not sure. Maybe Texan has better insight on this matter.

One possibility is that foreign sources were being used by scalpers to corner reservations in some sort of a scam, or they were facing significantly higher proportion of fraudulent CC charges from abroad. Before they took this step they had made it impossible to buy tickets using foreign Visa and Mastercards. Those cards had to be registered with an Indian verifier before they could be used. Amex was still open. And then they tightened the web membership requirement to require that the account be verified by sending a verification token by SMS to a +91 prefix mobile phone.

I hasten to add that this is just speculation on my part. The other possibility is simply that someone has a lot of free time to dream up new things to keep themselves gainfully employed, though having see the nature of this operation in close range I sort of doubt that.

The thing is, in India train tickets are such a prized commodity with demand outweighing supply manifold, cornering of tickets by "agents" and other illegal re-sellers is a serious problem. They book tickets in bulk when the reservations open 90 days in advance and then re-sell them to passengers desperate to travel at a high premium. In the olden days before internet booking came in, these agents use to send their insider men to the reservation offices and book tickets en masse by bribing/adjusting things with the ticket counter staff. When web ticketing option started, they moved on to tech-savvy way of block booking tickets by opening multiple sessions on the IRCTC website using multiple computers and multiple login etc. This menace became irritating to genuine passengers and so Indian Railways decided to tackle the issue head-on to ensure genuine passengers get an equal chance to grab the tickets. Their intentions are good but the implementation absolutely horrible. Every time they add in a "security feature", the agents are one step ahead and find out a way to bypass it, so they add another feature and agents bypass it and so on. They started with the requirement to have an account verified from an Indian cellphone as a way to ensure one person does not own a dozen IRCTC logins. When cellphone SIM cards became dirt cheap and agents started buying multiple phone numbers to create multiple logins, they added some feature about not allowing travel agents to book tickets for the first two hours. Even this didn't work so they came up with some policy about credit cards. Still no luck then now the latest experiment is not allowing anyone from same IP Address to book more than two tickets in a day.

Basically, as this cat and mouse game went on for several years, by now the IRCTC website has become a terrible mess, the ultimate museum specimen of everything that should not be in a ticketing website. It is a topic of ridicule and annoyance across the country. The rot has gotten so deep by now that the existing system needs to be thrown away and a new ticketing website needs to be built absolutely from scratch. I don't see that happening anytime soon in the bureaucracy-infected system but one can only hope. It is such an irony that the country whose citizens hold software development and IT job positions in companies across the world does not have a good functional secure website for the most widely used service in the country

Edited by Texan Eagle, 08 April 2012 - 05:09 PM.

[caravanman]

Hi,

Thanks for that explanation... in some ways it is good to know that it is a deliberate attempt to produce a fair system, rather than daft rules for no gain... but as you say, crooks do seem to find a way to subvert best intentions!
Maybe a "no exchange or cancelation " of tickets would work, if the passengers name and id had to be printed on the ticket when issued... There can't be many Mr Singhs in India!

Ed

Edited by caravanman, 10 April 2012 - 10:01 AM.

[Texan Eagle]

Hi,

Thanks for that explanation... in some ways it is good to know that it is a deliberate attempt to produce a fair system, rather than daft rules for no gain... but as you say, crooks do seem to find a way to subvert best intentions!
Maybe a "no exchange or cancelation " of tickets would work, if the passengers name and id had to be printed on the ticket when issued... There can't be many Mr Singhs in India!
Ed

Actually, it is required to have passenger's name, gender and age to be provided at the time of reservation and the same is printed on the ticket if the booking is done online. If the ticket is purchased from the ticket window the ticket has only gender and age of the passengers printed on it but the name of the passenger gets fed into the system and will be available to the ticket checker on board the train, so theoretically the system is well designed to discourage passengers traveling on tickets purchased by someone else (read: agents), but for reasons unknown to me, the scam goes on even today. I have no idea how do agent who block book tickets manage to get the correct passenger information and/or passengers are able to travel with wrong names, but it seems to be working. This being said, it is no excuse to have the reservation system as unfriendly and out-of-reach to foreign travelers as it is currently. It is just plain screwed-up if I may use the word, and the minister at the top wouldn't care about issuing orders to have it corrected.

[jis]

Hi,

Thanks for that explanation... in some ways it is good to know that it is a deliberate attempt to produce a fair system, rather than daft rules for no gain... but as you say, crooks do seem to find a way to subvert best intentions!
Maybe a "no exchange or cancelation " of tickets would work, if the passengers name and id had to be printed on the ticket when issued... There can't be many Mr Singhs in India!

Ed

Right, and then they will require electronically scan-able Indian Voter Registration Card with your thumb imprint on that or some such, and we are still screwed

Actually, they used to print an identity document number on the ticket but at some point they discontinued that practice, I don;t recall why.