Nuts & Bolts of online registration for railway ticket booking.

germantraveller

Thanks for the confirmation, Aishah.

That's exactly what I concluded after doing the test booking. So, no changes for foreigners.

kevin_Bkk

Thanks Beach for an incredible detailed and useful post.

Whilst perusing the Indian Railway website, I saw something about issuing E-tickets, as the airlines do. With airline E-tickets , the ticket is emailed to you and you print it yourself. That is the only ticket required. Could this be a new service offered, or did I misunderstand?

If not, and if pre-booked tickets are issued at Deli only. What do I do, if flying to Kolkata and not going to Deli. Can I collect from Kolkata?

yes, I have found it , it is here http://irctc.co.in/eticketsguide.html. So e-tickets are possible, wonderful! But wait for it, the only accept Indian credit or cash cards. So Visa and MasterCard, the two most popular cards on the planet are not accepted. can this be true?

sarkar

No. All Visa/Mastercards are accepted.
I think for international CC you have to select the Citibank Payment Gateway (CITI PG) or Axis PG.

A small extract from http://www.irctc.co.in/term_src.html

kevin_Bkk

Thank you Sakar; You are so kind! I will wait for my computer literate friend to visit and then try to book an e-ticket (attempt the impossible, as I am beginning to see it). To be honest, if I had known that it would be this difficult, I would never have started. I have an air ticket from Bangkok to Kolkata, and I am , sort of, thinking discarding it and going somewhere else instead. I -fool that I am- thought that I could just go to India and travel as I wanted by train. Now I discover archaic rules and insurmountable complexities, even in buying a ticket. Most trains are booked up weeks in advance, they say, so there goes the flexibility and I can't buy a ticket over the counter, when I arrive, as in other countries. Who else would design a system for buying tickets that hid the name of the accepted credit cards under confusing and inaccurate names and made it as difficult as humanly possible to achieve?

Thailand was a bit like that, when I first came to live here. Then they woke up to the fact that the easier you make it to buy, the more you sell. Now we can use any kind of credit card anywhere. People are just anxious to take your money in any form. ATM machines accept the cards of any country.
Before I went to India last year, The Indian Tourist Office told me I could use all my Thai. U.K and Australian cards in Indian ATM machines, when I got to Bihar, I found that 1) there are hardly any ATM machines and 2) they refused every one of my cards.I was almost as though India didn't want my money. Ah well! musn't grumble! just remember "Incredible India" Thanks again Sakar

razabpn

Guys... Is Irctc.co.in down today? Unable to login since morning???

BTW can someone list out external/technical reasons that can create problem? i.e. Pop Blocker, Firefox compatibility etc.

sarkar

Its working fine in my firefox, IE and Chrome browser. No problem.
May be your ISP's DNS server is down.

Change your DNS IPs to OpenDNS and then try to open IRCTC.
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Try opening the site on Chrome browser.

razabpn

Can you throw some more light on how ISP's DNS IP can create prob?
BTW my peculiar prob is, IRCTC page is opening, when i'm hitting the login button after typing userid & pswd, the page is not going anywhere nor changing. It is simply staying where it is.
And i am not facing any prob to browse other webpages, so hows DNS to be blamed for irctc prob?
But i assume it is something related to some settings issue.
I tried with IE, Firefox & Chrome..I have all three. Last time i visited irctc page was one month back, then used to work well. I have not had any major updates/change to my system in the interim btw..

sarkar

Oh! If the site is opening successfully in your PC then there is no DNS error. Its really peculiar..

Try opening the site and login by using a proxy. eg vtunnel[dot]com.

razabpn

Tried couple of things...
I tried with Reliance Datacard connection..Same prob. Earlier i had BSNL Broadband. SO ISP Prob is ruled out...

I am able to navigate every damn pages of irctc. Even tried to cirumvent the prob by creating another user ID. But same prob in that login screen again.

Tried logging with proxies.. its working but it will fail during peak hours considering the load on irctc..

I guess something to do with my system. Some OS files gone mad.. Script associated with Login "dialer box" is not working i guess... How peculiar is it..


Now after so much of fixing job... getting this error message after entering login values:

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Reference #7.488387d.1253508851.0

What could it be??? Million $ questions