Commuters in the city will not be able to make reservations for trains on August 2 and 3 as the system will be suspended for a few hours.
The facility will be out of service as the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) will be undertaking an online disaster recovery drill of the passenger reservation system.
Officials said that reservation of train tickets and internet booking would be suspended between 2.15 p.m. and 3.15 p.m. on Thursday. Uday Bobhate, general manager of CRIS, said, “We are testing our backup systems, which will come into use in the event of a disaster. We will be checking how much load the system can bear. We had performed a similar exercise with the passenger reservation system in Chennai.” The reservation operations will be shifted from the servers in Mumbai to the data recovery site in Secunderabad.
Reservations will remain open from 3.15 p.m. to 11.45 p.m. and will be linked to the recovery site. Reservations will be suspended again between 11.45 p.m. and 1.20 a.m. on August 3, following which reservations will switch back to the Mumbai servers.
Mr. Bobhate said, “This time we are checking the load that can be borne by the system and the time taken to switch the servers on weekdays. Similar exercises will be undertaken in other cities in the coming weeks.”