Thursday 6 October 2011

Travel with the Indian Railways

When was the last time you travelled with the Indian Railways? If you remember, do you have fond memories of those days? OR have you always been dissatisfied with the level of hygiene or punctuality that is so much not maintained in the railway station as well as in the train? I enjoy the trains as much as I enjoy the airplanes; however I was in for a pretty pleasant surprise while on an overnight travel from Bangalore. To start with the Railway Station seemed a lot cleaner than what I had found a couple of years back and a lot more convenient –right from the ticket booking stage.

Nowadays, Indian Railways requests you not to take print out of your e-tickets [if possible], and instead keep a PDF copy of the same in your smart-phone, laptop or any such device. This approach [if implemented by all the e-ticket passengers] is going to save about 0.3 million A4 size papers every day! I find this as a great gesture by IR towards being responsible towards –“Save paper, save trees”. When the ticket checker came in, he accepted the electronic versions of the ticket with a photo ID –absolutely no problem.