Tips to book an IRCTC Tatkal ticket faster

In India, trains are one of the easiest and cheapest modes of transport. Over the years, booking train tickets has become convenient using the IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation) website. In fact, according to the comScore and ASSOCHAM India report, IRCTC is the leading travel e-commerce site in the country with the highest transaction share in the travel category. One out of five online users in India visits the Indian Railways site, with almost 12 million unique visitors monthly and majority of the traffic is seen between 10 am to 12 pm. It is during this time that IRCTC allows booking Tatkal tickets, which means tickets that are reserved for people with last minute travel plans, travel emergencies and so on. IRCTC receives a lot of flak for its slow, sluggish performance and had become a laughing stock when the site crashed (server inability, low bandwidth) during the festivities last year, just minutes after Tatkal bookings began. Currently, it is said to sell about 40-45,000 Tatkal railway tickets between 10 am and 11 am (its 10 and 11, because all tickets are sold in one hour – in fact, 45 mins), which it plans to spruce up to 60-65,000 with the help of its new Rs. 10 crore drive for better, upgraded servers to 64GB RAM. This will allow 80 lakh concurrent connections compared to the current 10 lakh. The Tatkal online booking window opens a day in advance before the date of your journey just for an hour and tens of thousands of people try to log into the Tatkal booking system, which makes it as tough as getting into an overcrowded Mumbai local train during the peak office hours.If you’ve ever tried booking a Tatkal ticket, you will know how important each minute is and how annoying IRCTC’s online passenger reservation system can get. You have to make optimum use of each second as soon as the online booking counter opens, and those 5 to 10 minutes before the counter opens are also very crucial. We’ve laid out a guide to help you book a Tatkal ticket, along with a set of handy tech tools and tips and tricks that will help you bag a confirmed Tatkal ticket faster. Click here for full story