A new problem appearing on the IRCTC website while booking train tickets is causing great inconvenience, frustration, and intense irritation among passengers.
People prefer train travel because it is a little more comfortable and convenient than bus travel, and the fares are also slightly lower compared with private buses. Moreover, especially for the elderly and parents with small children, traveling by train is considered the safest option, so they book tickets for their journeys.
But this train ticket reservation business, especially when booking in advance during festival seasons, is really becoming a horse’s horn. Because getting train tickets has now become a major challenge.
For traveling by train, ticket reservations currently open 60 days in advance. Reservations for this begin every day at 8 a.m.
Similarly, for Tatkal ticket reservations, tickets can be booked on the day before travel. It opens at 10 a.m. for AC coaches and at 11 a.m. for sleeper coaches.
At times like these, opening the official IRCTC page for train ticket booking and logging in is a bit of a challenge.
If you open your account at the right time, enter the required train and passenger details, and click 'Book Now', an 'alert' appears like never before.

"We are experiencing High Load - please retry" is what it says. Its Tamil translation is "We are experiencing excessive load - please try again."
In other words, this issue arises because the internet server is under heavy load when hundreds of thousands of passengers try to book train tickets at the same time.
The same situation applies both on the IRCTC app on mobile and on the IRCTC website on a computer.
At times like this, even if the ticket booking option appears after a few minutes of continuous trying, by then the tickets we need are usually already sold out. Recently, many people have been saying that they are facing this problem.
Will the railway take note?
Earlier, train ticket reservations could be made 4 months — 120 days — in advance, then it was reduced to 3 months, and by the end of 2024 it has been cut to 60 days. As a result, there is intense competition for train ticket bookings. Similarly, competition for ticket reservations is also increasing because the number of people living in urban areas from various parts of the state for reasons such as work and education is rising.
However, the number of trains or coaches has not been increased significantly in line with passenger demand.
All right, if you try to book tickets on the trains currently available, there is this new problem.
Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the IRCTC website would be upgraded and a new website introduced so that passengers could book tickets more easily, and accordingly the “upgraded IRCTC website” was launched on July 15 last year, which is noteworthy.
Even on the upgraded website, it is still not possible to log in, even just for ticket booking.
During festival seasons such as Diwali and Pongal, when people try to book tickets to travel to their hometowns, problems like this often mean they are unable to get tickets.
As the number of people booking tickets increases, the necessary technical facilities on the website should be upgraded accordingly. However, the occurrence of such a problem even on the new website has caused severe inconvenience and dissatisfaction among train passengers.
Since the number of people booking tickets has now increased for various reasons, train passengers expect the railway to take note of this and fix the website issue.
