What NEED does this meet?
need for travellers and citizens in rapidly deveoping economy to get best use from transport system.
What is the APPROACH?
current railway website is indexed by train number and difficult to navigate. A route based service has a distinct benefit.
What are the BENEFITS to people?
far quicker determination of journeys. better resource for businesses.
What is the COMPETITION?
depends on upgrade to india railways website.
What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?
quite straightforward to applying a route planning system. network appears limited and data is clearly scrappable.
Michael Evans says:
[Initial proposal typed on a borrowed GPRS device hence brevity and lack of capitals].
>What is the COMPETITION?
>depends on upgrade to india railways website
Since submitting this proposal I have found such an option on the Indian Railways website here which does A to B journey planning: http://www.indianrail.gov.in/inet_srcdest_names.html
However it is not very obvious (no link off home page, and link found at bottom of ‘Trains between important stations’ page) - quite easily missable.
I will send a suggestion to add the link off the home page, as it is the obvious way to wish to find a train.
It is worth noting, that the difference with say UK rail (with hourly or half hourly departures between key cities) is that there are generally few trains per day between major cities - due to the large distances separating them; mostly configured as sleeper trains. A regular rail traveller would probably become accustomed to the major connections and the train service numbers / fixed departure times - and not have such a need for adhoc planning. With fewer alternatives, and long journey times it is probably not worth trying for different connections or complicated trips (having performed the task manually using a printed All India Railway timetable I didn’t find any alternatives to principal trains, for trips I was making). However it may become more of a concern in future, with expansion of transport.
written on July 12th, 2006forgethis says:
As far as I can tell, there is still no way of generating a ‘real’ A to B plan..
for example, to get from Goa to Guwahati… the site returns no results..
the ideal planner would tell me that i should take train A from Goa to Kolkata and train B from kolkata to Guwahati
written on July 10th, 2007Vimal says:
http://erail.in
written on August 18th, 2007Agnivo says:
check out http://www.indiarail.info
written on June 19th, 2008