Indian Railways hit a home run when they launched their online ticket booking portal for trains. Booking a ticket at any Indian Railways counter was such a pain. The long queues, the smell of sweat and the ultra slow officials who’d blow up their computers by the time it’s your turn, everything contributed to booking a ticket, making the journey ugly even before it began. Online ticketing not only added to the revenues but also made it convenient for people like me to book and print tickets at the comfort of their homes.
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I’ve been using the Indian Railways website for booking e-tickets online for a really long time now. Every time I have to use their website I need to keep my fingers crossed. I also need a hell of good luck to be able to book tickets smoothly. Sometimes it take an awful lot of time to load. Then there are times when the so called communication failures crop up for hours. Apparently they have scalability issues. The poor server is supposed to dance to the tunes of the entire country trying to book tickets online and through railways reservation counters. The server is left with no juice at times. So it starts crying and people like me suffer. Indian Railways is not able to invest in a proper back-end solution despite the huge profits they generate every year.
Forget scaling. Here’s another issue I’m experiencing. It’s 1130PM and the railways website is not even letting my print my previously booked e-ticket. Now that is weird! I understand that booking is permitted only from 5AM to 1130PM but I should be able to at least print my tickets now! WTF!
I guess this is the time the server gets some sleep. And they don’t want anyone to disturb. Wake up moron, I have a train to catch early morning tomorrow!
