Indian Railways provides a massive train service linking almost every corner of India to every other corner of India. However, finding the actual trains and connections that will take you, from say Indore to Rajkot, or Surat to Nasik, is a non-trivial exercise. Unless you have an expert understanding of Indian geography AND of Indian Railways AND you have a copy of the Railways bible – the TAAG ( Trains At a Glance ) – handy, you are out of luck. The Indian Railways website certainly won’t solve your problem. Major travel websites like Cleartrip.com, Makemytrip.com are fine for direct trains between the TOP 10 cities and their stations,but for anything more than that you are quite out of luck.
bharatbyrail.com is a website developed to fix this problem. You just type in the city names that you want to travel from and to – you don’t need to know the individual train station names and codes – a dropdown pick list assists you – add in the date and time ranges that you want to travel on and bharatbyrail.com finds you the best trains, as many as fit the travel criteria. All the connections needed to get you from A to B in the most direct way possible. are detailed. Armed with this information, you can make the requisite bookings at the Indian Railways, IRCTC website.
If connections are necessary bharatbyrail allows ample time for you to make the connections and for the possibilities of a late arrival of the incoming train. Of course, it goes without saying that a fog bound North India or a monsoon flooded Konkan cannot be catered for. bharatbyrail.com is only a computer algorithm after all.
Most sophisticated users can specify the precise source or destination station they want to use – for example, they can specify DR for Dadar, rather than the general Mumbai. For real die hard fans of India railways, bharatbyrail.com also provides an option for a multiple stops journey, along the circumference of India for example.
bharatbyrail.com is totally free and has no ads. It is reasonably fast, say 10 seconds for most searches. A web service is available for those who’d wish to incorporate it into a mashup.
Article Written by Shantanu K Karve.