This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.
Diwali gave me my first occasion to return home from Bharuch. This is a relatively small route to travel but is perhaps the busiest. Being on the straight Mumbai-Delhi line via Ahmedabad means some pretty heavy rush on the train lines. Wait listed tickets and endless refresh button clicking ensued.
The Bharuch (BH is the Indian Railway short code for Bharuch Junction) – Mumbai Central (BCT is the Indian Railways short code for Mumbai Central) journey was nice enough. Got on board at 2338 hrs and reached Dadar at 0415 the next day and reached home by about 20 minutes.
I used IndiaRailInfo.com to get the time-table. The website is pretty accurate in this regard. I also found it had this volunteer group that did many interesting things around the website – reported train progress reports, guessed whether a waiting list ticket would get confirmed or not (it predicts this but does not claim accuracy) and provides a very basic interface. I first started using this website in January when Kirk was here. Slowly I began to notice some of the crowdsourcing features around this website. One more piece in India’s strange love story with its Railway network.
IndiaRailInfo.com predicted that my ticket would be confirmed, however it did not and I returned from home by bus – a Neeta Volvo. I slept pretty well and reached Bharuch at 0430 hrs and walked the last mile home.
As I type this, I am back in Bharuch and back to work.
Parallel Spirals 