Indian Railways have launched a new version of TrainEnquiry.com
Trainenquiry.com is the official train enquiry and search site of the Indian Railways. It has launched a revamped website interface, in partnership with RailYatri.in. But the site is still in beta version and users can still access the older site. The website which provides information such as current status of the train, last known location and the estimated time to reach the next destination, in addition to the last two and next two destinations with estimated time, claims that the site has been visited by 55 lakh train travelers in India, within two months of the launch.
While the new design has been made the default one, users can still access the old interface. The all information provided on the train enquiry site the data is collected by the Centrel for Railway Information Systems(CRIS). and claims that it covers 80% of 3.29M sq kms of India with 7500 trains/week, 9000 train stations and 20 million daily riders.
Within a short time of going live, Railways site Trainenquiry.com, and Railyatri.in, operated by Stelling Technologies for the National Train Enquiry System (NTES), have managed to dig out some rich customer insights. As Mr Sunil Bajpai, Group General Manager, Centre for Railway Information System, (CRIS) points out, some of these insights could help the Railways build some value-added services on their portals that will be useful to passengers.
Around 9,000 trains run daily on the vast Indian Railways network. Minute by minute, kilometre by kilometre, running information on these as well as operations data from 6,000 railway stations filters into the CRIS office daily.
But till recently this huge volume of data was not getting transferred to the customer. Now, some of it is getting mined and being put “in real time” on Trainenquiry.com as well as Railyatri.in, and available to users online as well as over mobile phones. “We also plan to open the API (Application programming Interface) in such a way that third party service providers can source this information and provide it as well,” says Mr Bajpai.
Already, over Trainenquiry.com and Railyatri.in, passengers can find out the exact spot a train is at any given point. Going forward, useful information such as which platform it will chug into and perhaps even the exact spot on the platform a particular coach will halt at could be shared.
The site is powered by Railyatri.in and has been conceptualised and designed by TeamDecode.
Indian Railways have also launched a National Train Enquiry System (NTES) app that offers live status information of more than 8,000 trains. The app comes for free and if you want to use it, just access http://www.trainenquiry.com from your mobile Web browser. If the device is recognised as compatible (a list of supported devices/browsers can be found here), users are automatically redirected to the app, which can be used just like the TrainEnquiry.com site. We have tried it out and it works like a charm.
The site is also available in Hindi and even though it is still in beta, it already had ads (from Rediff, Sulekha.com and others). We must say that this is an interesting upgrade (and a very timely one at that) from the Indian railways and it does make searching for train-running information easier (and fun). If you haven’t already done it, give this new version a try and share your feedback with us.
Old design
New design
Mobile version: If we can’t access the website on our mobile it redirected us to railyatri.in/l. Having said that, the indian rail mobile site worked flawlessly on our Nokia Lumia 800 and we found that it sports a design similar to its desktop version. However, the auto-complete suggestion feature does not work on the mobile version.
Earlier, Indian Railways will install GPS devices on trains to track location in real-time. Once that project wraps up, CRIS will be able to receive information on train status in real-time. It might be possible that real time location tracking on Google maps is integrated with the site, in the future. If you haven’t already check mobile site, give this new version a try and share your feedback with us.
