Have waitlisted or RAC train ticket? Now you can check real-time availability of berths, get confirmed seat easily

Indian Railways has a good news for you. If you are on board a train with waitlisted ticket or RAC ticket, getting it confirmed is easier than before. Even if you have not booked a ticket due to unavailability of a confirmed seat, you will be able to check the positions of vacant seats after the chart preparation. Indian Railways prepares the passenger chart of a train four hours prior to its departure in most of the cases. The aircraft-like booking facility will enable a passenger to take a look at the complete coach layout.

The user-friendly interface will give a graphical representation of the train coaches and berth-wise accommodation status on irctc.co.in website. The system displays coach layout of 9 classes used in the reserved trains of Indian Railways and more than 120 different coach layouts have been incorporated.

Now to enhance travel experience and bring greater transparency for Indian Railway passengers, Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal has today launched a new facility for Public Viewing of Train Charts and Vacant Berths.

"The information about occupancy in trains as per Passenger Reservation Charts will now be available for public view on the internet through IRCTC website. This will facilitate the prospective passengers in getting the information of the vacant berths available in the train after chart preparation. Complete information of vacant berths from train source as well as intermediate locations will be available to the user. A prospective customer can use the information for online booking of vacant berths or through TTE as per business rules. This feature is available in the web as well as mobile version," said the railways.

Goyal said that it is another step to introduce transparency in the system and to add comfort to the travel experience of the passengers. He added that by introducing this new online platform for public viewing of train charts will put the practice of searching a Ticket collector in the moving train to an end. This new feature in ticketing system is a dynamic system which will keep upgrading itself as the train proceeds for the destination and make it more transparent as passengers can see the real-time availability of berths.

Speaking on the occasion, Girish Pillai, Member Traffic, Railway Board said, “Entire effort is to make reservation process as transparent as possible and comfortable to the public. The biggest advantage is passenger can see which berth is available even after second charts are made”.

He also added in 20 days, all Rajdhani & Shatabdi trains tickets can be booked even after second charts which are released 30 minutes before the departure of the train.

"This feature displays class wise and coach wise full vacant berth availability information as per the ‘First Chart’ of the train. ‘First Chart’ is prepared four hours in advance to train departure. If the ‘Second Chart’ is also prepared, then the option to view the details of vacant berth available at the time of ‘Second Chart’ will also be displayed. The ‘Second Chart’ is prepared about 30 minutes prior to the departure of the train, to accommodate the information of current reservations and cancellations done after ‘First Chart’. Both the charts will get updated for every charting location as the train heads towards its destination," said the railways.

How to access:

* On the home page of www.irctc.co.in a new option to view “CHARTS / VACANCY” will be available.

* On click of this option, journey details such as train number, journey date and boarding station will be taken from the user and on entering the same the user will be able to see class-wise and coach-wise number of vacant berths.

* The user can further click on a specific coach to see the coach layout along with berth-wise accommodation status like occupied for full journey, occupied for part journey and vacant for full journey.

Salient features:

* Availability of complete data on single click of a button

* Simple flow

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Enhanced Visual Experience:

* Visual representation of coaches

* Coach layout view

* Data also presented in tabular form with filters on each column.