Tired of waiting list train tickets? Now, Railways will predict if it'll get confirmed

The Indian Railways is set to introduce a feature that will inform the customers if their waiting or RAC tickets can be confirmed. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation or IRCTC, which handles online ticketing of Indian Railways, has refurbished its website that will go live tonight.

The new IRCTC website will predict the probability of confirmation of wait-listed tickets based on a new algorithm developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems.

A senior official in the Railway Ministry told PTI that "according to the new feature of wait-list prediction, one can predict the chances of a wait-listed or an RAC ticket getting confirmed on the basis of booking trends. We will mine our own data of passenger operations and booking patterns for the first time". The algorithm will take into account last 13 years' data to arrive at a robust, workable mode, he said.

According to the official, the idea had come from Railway Minister Piyush Goyal who gave one-year deadline last year to complete the process of inducting the predictive service on the IRCTC website. Nearly 13 lakh tickets are booked on the IRCTC website every day against a reserved accommodation of 10.5 lakh berths.

The new website will be more user-friendly. Now, the passengers will not have to log-in to the website to enquire or search for trains and check on availability of seats, while the older version only allowed access to the registered users.

In the last couple of months, the government introduced several new rules to make passengers' ticketing experience hassle-free. Last month, the Railways came up with some new rules to help the passengers seeking Tatkal tickets at the last minute in cases of emergency.

Last month, Indian Railways announced that if your train is fully - from start station to end station - cancelled, passengers' tickets will be cancelled and refunds will be processed automatically. In a tweet, the IRCTC said that in case of train cancellation, "PNR (passenger name record) will be automatically cancelled. Refunds will be processed in the same account through which payment was made".  

Earlier in March, Railways announced that it will allow passengers to transfer their confirmed ticket to another person in case they are unable to travel.

(With inputs from PTI)