Indian Railways, founded on April 16, 1853 is the state owned enterprise of India and is administered by Ministry of Railways govt. of India, has a multi-gauge network of tracks covering about 7172 stations on which it operates its trains carrying goods and passengers pulled by diesel, electric, and even steam locomotives. It is estimated that there are about 23 million passengers that are carried by railway in its 12,617 trains on daily basis, and it includes trains to Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan too.

don't miss your train !


There is wealth of information about Indian Railways which is available over the internet. But users are always on lookout for the information that is most useful for them, and are least interested about stats and history.

From the perspective of railway users, there are three most important websites related to indian railways
  • www.indianrail.gov.in - often mistyped as indianrailways.com, indianrail.com and Indianrailways.gov.in by users, is used for Availability, Fare information and PNR Status for Indian Railways.
  • www.irctc.co.in - IRCTC site, The official Indian Railways Online Booking website, often misspelt as IRCTC.com, IRCT, IRTC, IRCYC, IRCRC and ICTC.
  • www.trainenquiry.com - Trains Timetable and current running information on current status of trains and general information about all the trains operated by Indian Railways. It is also misspelt as nationaltrainenquiry.com, spotthetrain.in by the users. It is now popular among the users as national train enquiry system and one of its unique feature is that it also provides information about the fog affected trains running late than what is mentioned in schedule.
Apart from above 3 websites certain non state owned (i.e. non govt.) websites also have proved useful for users while dealing with railway information. Good examples are - 
  1. Cleartrip.com train calendar, which is useful for Indian Railways seat availability provides an indication of IRCTC seat availability for a range of dates across trains, so you can find the best date and train to travel.
  2. makemytrip.com which has tied up with Indian Railways to  provide IRCTC train reservation, Indian Railways reservation, IRCTC train tickets bookings, and train enquiry online. The good thing is that it rewards its users for using its railways service and has wonderful daily deals too.
  3. erail.in provides better way to search trains by providing live status of train running currently. Users can calculate fare, claim refunds, and even see the seat layout i.e. arrangement of seats in various types of coaches.
  4. ixigo.com also provides indian railways ticket booking online service. In fact in its title of train ticket booking page it cleverly puts "Indian Railways Ticket booking Online/ Indian Railways.com".


Best way of checking Indian Railways PNR Status (also known as passenger reservation status enquiry) is to go to www.indianrail.gov.in and best way of making internet bookings/ booking train tickets railway reservation is to go to www.irctc.co.in

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