You don’t have to stand in long queues at the railway station to get your travel tickets booked. You can have them booked at the comfort of sitting at home itself. You have a host of services which you can get from the Railway enquiry website online. PNR stands for Passenger’s Name Record. It is a ten digit unique number which you get on making your railway booking through the internet. It is an important reference number. PNR status Indian Railways is a great way of checking whether your berth has been confirmed or under waiting list. If you are not allotted a berth as such and there are a lot of other people as well waiting in the queue to get a berth confirmed, then the PNR status shows your berth under “RAC” which is Reservation against Cancellation.
When would an RAC berth confirmed under your name?
When someone is cancelling their ticket at the last minute due to unavoidable circumstances their reserved berth goes to the next person waiting at the queue. Like if you have make the booking very next to the person who has made the original booking and the original berth gets cancelled at the last minute, that is when you stand chances of getting the aforesaid berth confirmed in your name. RAC is a common acronym that has been followed by the Indian railways for ages.
Just that now-a-days with the help of PNR numbers you can check the status yourself as to whether you are having a confirmed berth or whether it still shows RAC. The information also gives an insight on how many are on the waiting list in terms of numbers for the same berth you had booked for. This happens when you make reservations during week-ends or on festival days when most of the major bound trains get filled up to the brim.
You can stand at an advantageous position as far as getting a reserved berth under your name when you make bookings at least 3-4 months prior to the date of commencement of the actual journey.
Other Services on the website
You can find details on availability of trains. You need to get the train number from the railway time-table. Then you need to input Station code. For instance if you are taking the train from Bangalore City, the station code is BNC. You want to reach Chennai Central the station code is MAS. You get the train availability and its relevant fare. You get information on availability of super fast trains and Raj-dhani trains.
You can probe into the website if you are taking your wife to celebrate her honey moon and you want to book the journey through Shatabdi Express. Shatabdi Express is an A/C day coach offering food on your table. The entire food and beverages including the comfort of an air conditioned coach is included as a part of the fare. You can view station codes and trains at a glance.
You need to explore more into the railway enquiry website so that you have information on desired trains and their availability at your finger tips.