Some Tips For Organizing You Travel In India

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The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step

-Lao Tzu

India has its own culture, own religion, own heritage, own enriched natural resources and all of these attracted foreigners since the early centuries. But how they reached India? All of them reached India either by ship or by walking or on horse back . They covered hundreds of miles year after year. Now the situation has changed. Sailing or horse riding is now nothing but a daydream.

To make the journey comfortable, science has invented trains, car airplane etc. All of them have shortened down the traveling time. Once men queued before the ticket counters for tickets. It is nothing but the wastage of time. Again, to meet the demand of fast life, science has invented reservation facilities or online booking facilities or pre-paid facilities.

Booking of tickets prior to journey has many facilities-
• It can reduce the gathering before the ticket counters
• Reduce anxiety
• Give confirmation of the journey

Train reservation booking in Indian Railway is very popular both to Indian and to foreigners. The booking may be available from Indian railway’s own counter or from railway appointed private agent counters. Which are available in the local area. One can easily book his/ her reservation from that counter or directly from railway counters. At present all major stations have been connected with an online reservation booking facility called as IRCTC.

For train reservations in India you can create your account and directly purchase a ticket from www.irctc.co.in you can use your credit card here and if you have Indian bank account then its even better.

Not only you can book your train journey through IRCTC but you can also plan it such that you know everything before hand the seat availability, cost, train running information, train timetable and alternate routes etc.

How railyway reservation works in India and some important terms ?

For a foreigner and even citizens the Indian train lingos is quite complex and the fact that there is so less information also doesn’t help, let me try to explain most of them now.

RAC : This means Reservation against cancellation in simple term if you get a ticket online with this text then it means your ticket is valid and you are allowed to get into the reservation boogey/compartment but you might have to share your seats with one more person with similar tickets having same seat number as you. Don’t panic I mean not just yet this also means that once ‘someone’ cancelled their reservation or failed to show up then you will be automatically upgraded if its known before 2hrs of your scheduled journey else you have to chase TTE (Train Ticket Examiner) to have it upgraded in case seat is available, remember in India nothing gets done automatically so constantly asking TTE about it helps, else your sharing partner will get it if he is more active than you.

WL : This means Waiting List; Wait-Listed ticket issued without confirmed accommodations and so you are not allowed to board a reservation compartment and if found so you will be fined, you have option to wait 2 hrs before the journey and see if your ticket is upgraded when final travellers chart is made available on train platform, if your name is not listed there then be prepared for anything, may be if you are smart enough you can grease ‘some’ palms and still enter in reserved compartment and get a seat. (Did i just said that oops).

For complete list of Indian train abbrevation please refer to the site : http://www.irfca.org/faq/faq-acronym2.html

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