Travel without Ticket / Insufficient Ticket in an Emergency

Here are a couple of anecdotes about how the system copes in an emergency.

1. I had booked myself in a CC on the Sinhagad Express to Pune from the suburbs of Mumbai. Unfortunately, the day of travel was the Friday of the multi-day Mumbai attack and although trains were running mostly on time by the Friday, they were erratic, the locals were severely delayed, while the long distance trains kept to schedule, my connecting local ride was delayed and so I missed the long distance train by about 40 minutes.

"What to do" as they say in India - there is a train almost every hour between Mumbai/Pune; so I just bought a second general unreserved ticket for the journey for INR40, when the long distance Mumbai / KanyaKumari train came along I just climbed aboard and into the 2A(C) compartment, it was pretty empty - I expected to just explain the situation to the TC, pay up the difference as needed and so on.

As it happens, over the 2 hours journey nobody came along to check the tickets, so I never found out what the excess fare, if any, would be; and as the carriage filled up and emptied and I talked to a few people, MOST of the people in the carriage were people who had missed earlier trains.

Everybody and everything was f'ed up I suppose but the system flexed and coped. Way to go !

2. This was on the Matheran/Neral toy train - I saw this heated discussion on the platform between an old woman+son and the TC - I tried to listen in, discreetly, I was taught it was impolite to eavesdrop, even on 90Db conversations ;( but I wished the crowd would shush so I could listen in from my seat in FC !), it seemed she had a family emergency and HAD to travel but the entire 2nd class is reservations only, and no GC tickets, and she didn't have enough money for FC(and thus definitely insufficient money for a taxi drive down the mountain). I have no insight in the verbal resolution of the issue but when the train was halted for an hour waiting for the UP train to pass, everybody had got off the train and there was that old woman amongst the milling crowd.

I tried to make a point to see how she traveled - I tried to spot her climbing back on the train to see where she went - it looked like she was traveling "between"/outside the carriages, with the blessing and even care of the TC no doubt.

Again the system flexed and coped !

-skk

The newspapers regularly carry advertisements promising criminal prosecution of those travelling without proper tickets.

Whilst I'm sure there are TTEs who may sometimes be flexible, even bendable, I also think they have probably heard every 'emergency' story in the book, including all the true ones!