Online Train booking in India

The Backstory 

Indian Railways is suddenly back in fashion after the low-cost airlines suddenly found that they could not live upto their names thanks to sudden and stratospheric increase in the price of aviation fuel.

According to Wikipedia, Indian Railways transports as many as 18 million passengers a day over a route length of more than 63,327 km. Now, there was a time when many of these 18 million passengers would buy their tickets at the station or at rail reservation counters, leading to very long queues and wait times of as much as a couple of hours. All this changed when the Indian Railways started the facility of booking tickets over the Internet in August 2002. By the next year, it had sold a hundred thousand tickets worth nearly 3 million dollars. Cut to the present; in 2009-2010, nearly 72 million tickets were bought over the Internet

Quite a few Online Travel Agencies have seen the merit of branching into online train booking services after the decline in air travel, and linked up with Indian Railways to provide these services. All you need is a credit card and a computer with a printer attached. Oh,and also a valid identification number such as a Passport Number to provide as proof of identity.

If you go onto the Indian Railways Booking site, you will find what amounts to an obsession with proof of identity. This is because the shortage of seats on the rail network has created a flourishing black market in tickets with touts and agents conniving with railway staff to block tickets. It is not rare to find a train fully booked within minutes of the booking window opened which is usually 60 days in advance of the date of travel. All kinds of measures have been taken to get tickets in the hands of genuine travelers, the latest of which is that all travelers have to carry proof of identity with them. It is advisable to check the alerts page before travel to make sure you have all your documents with you.

Indian Railways Booking Site
This is the site run by the Indian Railways. You'll first have to set up your account, and then log in with a username and password. You can do everything from booking tickets to canceling them online. In the event you cancel, the refund will go back to the account you booked from.

You can use a variety of methods to make your payment online, from credit to debit cards and cash cards. The transaction charges vary substantially, with a flat fee of Rs 10 for debit cards and as much as 2% of the transaction value for credit cards. The exact transaction charges can be found here. Alternatively, if you don't want to go through the whole rigmarole of setting up an account, and would just like to check availability of seats, you can do so at their alternative site.This site also contains all the minutiae about the different types of tickets, terms and conditions etc.

(Yet another) Indian Railways Booking Site
The Indian Railways has introduced another booking site after the old one was taken over by scamsters and booking agents. The new one has all kinds of barriers including verification by sms and email before one can register and gain entry to the site. At he time of writing, though I have got the sms, I am yet to get the verification email so I'll be updating this after that. There is also a news article that one can now book tickets over the mobile but exact details still remain a state secret.
Update 2 August 2011: According to a scrolling banner on this site, "e-ticketing has been temporarily discontinued" As someone commented this speaks very poorly of a site that was three years in the making to go down within one week of going live.

Cleartrip Trains
Train Tickets can also be booked over Cleartrip through a simple 4 stage booking process.The Cleartrip site is far more intuitive and flexible than the Indian Railways site which can sometimes return all kinds of error messages unless you give precise info about the station you wish to embark from or the train you intend to take. For instance, to this day, I am unable to book a ticket from Hazrat Nizammuddin, one of the major stations in Delhi because the way I spell Hazrat Nizammuddin is different from the Railways:-(
Cleartrip also has a calender function which shows availability across a range of dates which can be very helpful.

Thomas Cook
The Thomas Cook site is also enabled for booking train tickets. There is not much to differentiate these sites other than negligible differences in the commission they charge for their services.

Ezeego1
Ezeego1 is the latest site to jump onto the train booking bandwagon(excuse the pun:-). But, only for Indian citizens.

Makemytrip
If all the other OTAs have got into the train booking space, will Makemytrip be left behind. They have a pretty basic site unlike cleartrip which offers a lot of extras.

Yatra
Yatra has also got into train booking but it's nothing to write home about. The site took quite some time to load, partly because of communication problems with the Indian Railways booking server which is something all the sites have to contend with, but Cleartrip does the best. I guess it's the old story of putting a Fiat's engine in a Ferrari as far as these sites are concerned.

Booking via Mobile
There are a few mobile apps that can be used to book tickets. There is nothing much to differentiate them from each other since they are all Java apps and suffer from limitations thereof. I have used a couple of them a couple of times but did not find it to be a smooth experience. From what I remember, I wanted to cancel the last ticket I'd booked via a mobile app but forgot the password. To my utter consternation, I was told that there was no way of logging in or getting a fresh password if I'd forgotten the old one. Fortunately, I remembered the password after literally standing on my head for a couple of hours and was able to cancel the ticket and get my money back. So, caveat emptor. I f you still want to risk it, the apps are Atom, Paymate, and ngpay. Indian Railways had also announced its mobile app with a lot of fanfare and sent me a mail with a link to its mobile site but as of writing this today (22/01/2012), this link redirects to the main site.

Parting Notes
Another value addition to on-line booking that has been a long time coming is the option to pay for food also in advance at the time of booking. As of now, according to news reports, this is a pilot project on just two out of the 9,000 trains that run on the network. For the uninitiated, other than on certain trains such as the Rajdhani and Shatabdi Expresses, one buys food while travelling on a "pay as you go" basis. A lot of travellers eschew the food served from the train's pantry car and buy from stations enroute as well.

One more tip, to find out train timings, all you have to do is dial 139 from either a landphone or your mobile phone, and then follow the instructions given by the Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS). You can also get rain timings through SMS by sending the message AD fololowed by the Train No and the Station STD Code to 139. For example, send AD 2626 011 to 139 find out the departure time of the Kerala Express from New Delhi. The problem is that for the IVRS, you would have to know the train number, and for the SMS based info, you would have to know the train number as well as the STD code of your stop:-)

If you want the whole range of options provided by Indian Railways, you are advised to stick to the Indian Railways booking site.

P.S. Just to pass a fresh bit of information along, one can use one's account to make a maximum of 10 transactions in a month, a daft rule if ever there was one!!!