IRCTC Autofill for the next generation railway booking

The much wanted IRCTC autofill for next generation irctc.co.in site, which people make use of for booking tatkal tickets, and doing fast railway reservation is still a work in progress. Those who are not aware of it - the IRCTC autofill allows a user to fill in the railway reservation form quickly. It does so by keeping the information required to enter in IRCTC reservation form ready, which can be later entered by a simple click of a button - known as "magic button".

The first one of such automatic filling tool was developed by Amit Agarwal of 'digital inspiration'. You can see the magic autofill at ctrlq.org site or download and install it as an extension in your browser.

For Chrome browser download extension here.
For Mozilla Firefox download  plugin here.

In this video Mr. Amit Agarwal shows how to use it.

But what has happened is that, the IRCTC, has upgraded it's site since and it now uses the new technology. This means that the old auto filling doesn't work. This is a welcome step because when automatic form filling works, those who are not tech savvy or computer savvy are in disadvantageous position when it comes to do fast railway ticket booking. Those who are used to using computers would use the tool to do quick ticket booking, hence no seats are available for regular users as all of them are booked before they type in the details manually into the online form.

Even those who don't quite know about the availability of such a tool that fills in railway reservation form automatically, make use of their browser's inbuilt ability to fill in the desired information. Almost all new browsers compatible with irctc have the ability to automatically fill information like userid, password, address, email information in login and registration page of irctc. But the passenger details, which takes maximum time filling in, cannot be filled in by browser automatically. This is where 'irctc autofill' comes into picture, as it can fill even the passenger details.

But now, as it is mentioned before, it doesn't work since the site is redesigned completely. But one can still quicken up the reservation task. There are inbuilt tools inside the 'irctc.co.in' site that can be used for filling up forms quickly. For example, one can keep the passenger details stored in advance inside the online passenger reservation system by using master passenger list. The passengers can be added to the master list by user by accessing the profile section of his IRCTC account.

Apart from maintaining passenger list, along with their details, one can search for train number, name, on railway site and note it down on paper. To further quicken up the process, one can also check the latest seat availability status of irctc so that the reservation is attempted only in trains where seats are available. With both these information with the user, he can use the 'quick booking' option to do fast ticket booking. One can follow the instructions in quick book ticket guide on IRCTC next generation eTicketing system.