Tag: Indian Railways

  • Trackside – A Collection of Railway Stories (2013)

    This book came out in March 2013. I purchased it in September 2013 on my Kindle then. I follow the author of this book on Twitter and probably learned about the book from there.

    I was in a reading rut after my son was born. I could listen to audiobooks on Audible but couldn’t pay attention when I read any book (physical or digital). I wanted to break this rut. So, I went back to my Kindle device and searched back to the first book I purchased on the Kindle. It turned out to be this book.

    Cover of the book, Trackside: A Collection of Railway Stories, by Bharath Moro

    I loved some of the descriptions that he uses to describe the trains and railway buildings. He gave me the vocabulary to talk about sights that I see in my travels.

    The red and cream locomotive screams into the platform with its assortment of coaches bobbing wildly.

    Chapter 1: In Favour of Koraput and Bodinayakannur

    Unlike the disjointed feeling one gets after a long flight, the railways allows for a gradual takeover. The landscape keeps changing, the houses seem different after a while, the food on the platform becomes less palatable (or the reverse) and the tea tastes better (or worse). And, by the time you arrive, you haven’t so much arrived as you have assimilated the destination.

    Chapter 1: In Favour of Koraput and Bodinayakannur

    The quaint old structures that used to house the station master’s office and booking counters have been demolished and replaced by banal, CPWD type boxy buildings, painted in a hideous urine yellow hue.

    Chapter 7 : Dispatches from the Cauvery Delta

    The book was an absorbing read and got me unstuck from my reading rut.

  • E-ticketing and New Age Travels

    I plan to spend New Year’s in Ahmedabad. I will have a separate post for what I did there after I return. But, preparing for the trip itself deserves a blog post. I prepared for the trip solely on phone calls with Manoj Pai, an amateur astronomer in Ahmedabad with whom I am in touch with since 2004 but have never met a single time and cleartrip.com, a site introduced to me by Kirk in December, 2010.

    The Indian Railways earlier this year introduced the concept of having electronic tickets (the official note is here). This meant that you could show tickets on your mobile phone and you did not need to carry an actual paper ticket in your hand. They claim they can save 3 lakh A4 size papers if this idea is implemented. A worthy environmental effort and I support it. I have travelled paper-less on Indian Railways.

    The problem arose when I book a ticket through a travel agent such as cleartrip. I love the formatting that cleartrip does for the ticket of Indian Railways. However, they sent me an .html attachment of the ticket and I did not have a .pdf document printer on my laptop nor did I want to buy from Adobe.

    To solve this problem, I installed CutePDF writer and Ghostscript. With their powers combined, I got a .pdf printer for my computer. The CutePDF website has pretty straight forward instructions on how to use and set it up. This solved my .pdf printing problem.

    I asked the question on Twitter on whether the email from cleartrip could be used as an e-ticket. @MumbaiCentral, @akisaxena, @girishmallya and @basrur replied and provided answers that ranged from yes to maybe. I did not get a convincing answer based on real experience. @MumbaiCentral suggested that I try this out but carry a .pdf backup – just in case. This is what I hope to do today.