Rail booking for Deepavali gone within 8 minutes

CHENNAI: Advance reservations for rail travel on November 3 – two days ahead of Deepavali – to various southern destinations in the State closed within 9 minutes of the ticket counters opening at 8 am on Thursday, leaving in dismay many people, some of whom had lined up at booking offices much before daybreak.

Tickets for Madurai-bound Pandiyan Express were sold out in eight minutes and two seconds, flat. The next six seconds saw all berths in another nine trains to destinations such as Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari, Thanjavur, Mangalore, Coimbatore and Tiruvananthapuram booked.

Attributing the quick booking to the high speed system that’s capable of processing 20 to 30 transactions per second, and to the popularity of the Internet booking – 70 per cent of the booking was done by individual Internet users – Southern Railway said that in the first eight minutes and 10 seconds around 3,196 bookings were made for 8,729 passengers. The railway press release said that precautions were taken to help individual passengers by blocking bulk and Tatkal booking on the opening days.

Railway sources said that tickets for many other trains closed in the first 20 minutes. Among the disappointed passengers was T Muthupandian, a native of Thoothukudi, who said that he missed getting a ticket because he was late in joining the queue.

As e-ticketing was the major reason for bookings closing so early, T Ravi Kumar, founder of Rail Passengers Association, said steps should be taken to earmark only a limited number of tickets to be booked/sold online as the common man was dependent on ticket counters.