After months of testing, Indian Railways has finally launched a new edition of the IRCTC portal. IRCTC.co.in is one of the most visited websites in India. It is used every day by over 1 million people.
Indian Railways has been improving the website every 2/3 years. Despite improving the design and infrastructure, the website didn’t provide a great experience at 11 AM. Why is this so? Well, 11 AM is the time when 1000s of people log in to the portal to book a tatkal ticket.
The new edition of IRCTC website provides new features. It also has a new design. But is it fast? Is it easy to use? Let’s find it out!
Technologies used
The refurbished IRCTC website employs asynchronous javascript heavily. According to BuiltWith, the new IRCTC website has been built with the AngularJS framework.
Features
The website allows you to find trains between two stations. It also enables you to see the availability of tickets without logging in. The from/to city drop-down list now displays the city name in Hindi as well as the English language. To book a ticket, you must log in to the website.
The login form appears in a popup box when you click on the book button. The popup may appear when you click the text box that appears in the “Find Trains” form. To get rid of it, the user must click the escape key of the keyword or other parts of the page.
Once you log in to the website, you’ll find various filters and options to see the seat availability/fare on the screen. The portal lets users filter trains by their departure/arrival times, train type, and class. It allows you to increase or decrease the text font size.
Unlike the previous Indian Railways site, the booked ticket history page of the new IRCTC site displays a tabbed interface and a checkbox to filter the result by booking/journey date. It allows you to see the tickets you’ve canceled in the past.
The website allows users to file TDR and see the TDR history. It features an “Alert” section where you’ll find the details of new trains and features Indian Railways has introduced recently.
One of the newest features of the IRCTC website is the “Preferred Banks” section that lets users add a preferred payment method. The website also features a CNF probability tool that predicts the chances of a ticket being confirmed. Before this tool was introduced, the user had to reply on ConfirmTKT and other sites to predict the PNR confirmation. Now, they don’t have to use third-party tools for the same.
Issues
If you’re using an ad-blocker, the website will display a loading animation for an indefinite time each time you click on the text boxes. Millions of users are using ad-blocking extensions to get rid of ads on web pages. If website’s features are not working, the user should disable the advertisement blocker and reload the page.
Conclusion
I’ve booked over 30 tickets since 2010. In the past eight years, the website has undergone several changes. The latest edition of the IRCTC portal has a refreshing design. It is fast and has become easier to use by addition of Hindi city names in the drop-down list.
I enjoyed using the new IRCTC website. Did you?
