If you’re travelling by train and worried that your ticket is not yet confirmed, there are several websites and mobile applications that can check your chances of getting a confirmed ticket, besides offering other railway-related services.
Last month, Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd. (IRCTC) launched the ‘IRCTC BlackBerry 10 App’, a free application that provides booking facility of tickets on phone and other services such as checking reservation status, PNR status, train schedules, routes, availability of tickets, cancellation and booking history.
Passengers’ reviews range from superlatives to scathing criticism. Some grouses are that the phone hangs, the payment page gets “stuck”, a “try again later” message appears frequently and the page times out quickly.
The “good app with lots of flaws” does not allow anyone to log in between 8 a.m. and noon.
There are two more apps (neither is officially connected with Indian Railways) providing train-related services.
Benefits Website >www.trainman.in tells a passenger whether to book a waiting ticket or not.
It also allows passengers to compare waiting tickets of various trains and the chance of confirmation of a booked ticket.
It uses three colours to indicate the probability of getting a confirmed ticket. Green indicates that the ticket will get confirmed or will be RAC; yellow is the “unreliable” zone where it is difficult to predict the ticket’s final status, and red means the ticket will not get confirmed.
Mohammed Amir, its founder, said the website has an average rate of prediction accuracy of about 82 per cent, obtained by testing three lakh actual PNRs. However, he said, there never are guarantees with any prediction. They can always turn out to be false. “That is why we have prediction chances as percentages, which gives the user an estimate of how sure we are while predicting his confirmation.”
Another website >www.confirmtkt.com says it can help passengers with: predicting their ticket confirmation chances if they have a waitlist ticket, subscribing for PNR confirmation notifications, searching trains between source and destination, comparing all ticket confirmation chances for trains on a single screen, and deciding on travel options.
Via email If a passenger’s ticket is on the waiting list or RAC and needs to be notified when the ticket gets confirmed, the passenger will get an email notification.
