indiarailinfo v erail

I have noticed that many of the senior forum members recommend erail.in as a source of train information. Others, mainly Indian based, seem to go for indiarailinfo.com.

As far as I understand it both sites draw their basic information from indianrail.gov.in and are both blocked from time to time by the official site.

Does erail offer anything that indiarailinfo doesn't? Or vice versa?

Railinfo offers a average running time (late/on time) and the rake composition of certain trains, don't think erail does this.

And the Erail chrome extension, for availability works better for me than the indiarailinfo one.

But I use both on a regular basis.

Short distance passenger trains which don't have reserved seats, for example. It is easier to stitch together an unusual or a complicated itinerary using erail and a railway map.

Erail is working on a beta version. I am not sure if members are aware of it.

Both Erail and IRI has a lot to offer to general users as well as they both have drawbacks. I, however would not go for any direct comparison.
As per as using the Chrome extension goes, both works fine for me. Just to conclude Erail has always been framed as an alternate to the official website whereas IRI was positioned as a super-forum where people can share their experiences and also can avail some of the features pertaining to Indian Railways.

Yes, I mostly use the same. This was announced by the concerned owner of Erail in their concerned blog forum well before it was announced in public. IRI is however experiencing some recent changes in view of the upcoming mobile apps, offline browsing, and increased integration with native device capabilities like camera and gps.

erail has the new version that allows identifying trains via a major stop. erail would tell you that BBS-CDG has no direct trains, but may give a hint to travel from BBS-NDLS & NDLS-CDG - the next version does so much more in terms of possible trains & wait times based on your selections. i think it is wonderful

indiarailinfo certainly help know the number of coaches, which helps a lot in knowing whether a specific WL or RAC stands a decent chance. this info in erail is very inconsistent. also IRI displays intermediate stations (where train would not stop) - this is not entirely accurate, but would help a railfan...

Could you kindly elaborate please?

I would rate 90di better than erail in terms of the above.


The accuracy issue comes when there are some bypass lines between two points. Unless and until one travels in the concerned train, it is not possible to know whether the train takes the main line or takes the bypass line. (Sometimes for smooth passage/sometimes to avoid reversal)

1. go to erail.com - see the top line, where it says New Version, clicking that brings http://erail.in/eRail2.htm - this has the feature of specifying a VIA station option

2. fair enough. i prefer the erail UI & would stick with that for now.

3. you are right on target. when there are multiple routes between two major stations, it tends to use the 'typical' route instead of the exact one...

Works only when the user has a fair bit of idea about railway routes. For ex:- I need to go from Howrah to Kanyakumari and then I put up a via station of Jammu Tawi in the option provided at the website.

The same actually works better without the "via" option.

i wanted to say, not exactly, but i see you have already answered the question... for others, just mention from & to, and you will see a few suggestions on which via stations can be considered, click on them & you can see SRC-VIA-DEST combo on the page.

Interesting thread.

Basically, for direct, easy to find train info (the kind of info a tourist needs), erail is fantastic.

For more detailed info (train fans kind of stuff), IRI is best.

But things haven't always been this way, and things are changing fast.

I remember when erail first started, I done a few tests on the new website, tests that I knew were complex, and the site failed on quite a few tests, out of frustration, I slated the site, I then received a very friendly message from erails owner (I wouldn't have been friendly if all my hard work had just been rubbished by some foreigner who thinks they know it all), and he asked me to help him iron out a few problems with the website, and he would consider any request I had to improve the website, I've hit that man with dozens of suggestions since, and every time he either implements them, or explains why it can't be done, he is forever trying to improve erail, and it shows, there are a few improvements coming soon that will be fantastic.

Erail is awesome for searching for train timings, but it's power is only truly realised when you understand all the different clickable buttons for re-organising the results.

Erail also does a more powerful version (commercial) for travel agents, it's awesome, in one quick search you can find all the quotas for different parts of a trains journey, or get availability for every train on a particular route, I hope that one day some of this will feed down to the free version.


I've not kept as close an eye on Indianrailinfo, when I first found it I found it confusing and with a lot of mistakes, for one reason or another I find myself checking the website about every year, and each year I'm more impressed than the last, and lately it's doing some pretty amazing things.

IndianRailInfo is THE place to go if you want Indian Railway news
(I asked for a button to show only English language news items, you'll find it at the top left of the page), they have a system of connecting related news items, I can see how useful this can be, but sometimes you need to scroll a hell of a long way down the page to get past a long story, I hope in the future that the 'linked news items' can be hidden and require a click to open them, it will make it so much easier to fly through all the news items.

IndianRailInfo is excellent when it comes to information about a certain train, reliability, coach composition, food, comfort, departing platform, this info can be invaluable.

IndianRailInfo is the place to go to get an educated guess about your waitlisted ticket, that website has some very clever members.

IndianRailInfo's clickable rail atlas is a fun and very useful research tool for tourists.

IndianRailInfo has come a very long way in the last few years, and is a fun and useful website if you know where to look and have a reasonable knowledge of the railways, but I do feel it will almost always be a rail fan's website, and 95% of it's members will likely be Indian, most foreigners will likely never know the meaning of "NDLS-HWH POORVA gets WAP5", the Indian initial bug can put off many new viewers.

I think that this must be where I am missing something. I can't even find a way to get availability to show on erail whereas it seems very simple to find on indiarailinfo.

Is there an erail tutorial somewhere?

Dave

Put in the source & destination stations, choose the date from the calendar and then click the source-destination box on the left of the date.

The list of trains appear and beside each train on the right, there is table that lists the class of travel and a Y (in green). For the class you want, click the Y and erail connects to irctc to give a list of availability by date (next few days). Do try it out.


Cheers

Nattusbs

Nattusbs

Thanks. I tried and it didn't work but I noticed there was a small note towards the bottom of the page about Firefox and Chrome plug-ins. When I downloaded the Firefox one it works if I click the blue Av listed against each class.