It seems that sometime in July / August 2010 IRCTC has changed the timings for its online railway reservation system. Whereas earlier, the reservation was not allowed from 23:30 night to the next day early morning, the reservation is now closed only for a period of 1 hour (from 23:30 to 00:30).
The 90th day reservation timings are different: That is, if a ticket is booked on the 90th day (the first day advance reservation begins) from the travel date, the reservation only begins at 8 a.m. This is only for the 90th day advance booking.
The new timings are especially convenient for people wanting to book tickets from another timezone (read NRIs), but I think it would put the people booking at the reservation counters at a huge disadvantage. The counters open only at 8 a.m.
I recently tried booking a ticket during the peak Christmas vacation. 37 seconds after 8:00, I was already wait listed.
1 comment:
37 seconds ? I've been told that even tatkal tickets get sold out within a minute on popular routes. Its a real drag isn't it. Here's hoping your waitlist number is low enough and you get bumped up.
Have you thought about a roundabout route ? A less direct route. You can try my free and ad-free website bharatbyrail.com to plot such a route. I wrote the routing algorithm mainly because irctc doesn't provide, in my estimation, routes between any A and any B station in India about 55% of the time !
Anyway good luck.
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