The New Era of Train Tickets

With the commencement of the advanced printing technology, the situation has now been changed. Now not only the railway tickets can be printed by the computers, reservations can be made online. This practice is known as Computer reservation system. All you need to do is, to sit on the Internet, go to the official website of Railways or a travel website, click on the online reservation link, give your credit card or debit card number and after getting confirmation of your ticket, take a printout of that page. That’s it. You don’t have to stand in the line for hours, or asked for the availability of reservation.

Computer reservation system or simply train tickets reservation system is a computerised system, which is used to store and retrieve reservation information and conduct transformations. This system was originally designed and created for air travel ticket booking. This system was later extended for the use of travel agents. Major CRS operation that book and sell tickets for multiple railways, airlines are known as global distribution systems. Apart from the official site of Indian Railways there are few commeercial travel sites out there in the Internet who gives the advantage of reserve train tickets online.

The system architecture of the major GDSes are largely based on a mainframe Transaction Processing Facility framework. While reliable and capable of large workloads, it has relatively faster processing power and can be expensive to maintain and upgrade. Recently, the companies have started selectively migrating processes from their older mainframes to service oriented architectures. By using lower-cost, high performance platforms, they are improving their capacity to handle a fast-rising “look-to-book” ratio. That is, the actual purchases compared to total number of cheap rail tickets. The ratio has increased over time as ‘WWW robot search GDSes’ more frequently comes and consumers often compare offers before buying a ticket.