With an aim to enhance travel experience and bring transparency for passengers, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal launched a new feature on the IRCTC website through which the passengers can view the reservation chart and vacant berths online even after chart preparation.

A senior Railway Ministry official said that the information about occupancy in trains as per passenger reservation charts will now be available for public view on the internet through IRCTC website (www.irctc.co.in). “This will facilitate the prospective passengers in getting the information of the vacant berths available in the train after chart preparation,” he said.

Speaking on the occasion, Goyal said that it is another step to introduce transparency in the system and to add comfort to the travel experience of the passengers. “With introduction of such online platform, travellers need not to search for ticket collector in the moving train,” he said.

“This new feature in ticketing system is a dynamic system which will keep upgrading itself as the train proceeds for the destination and make it more transparent as passengers can see the real time availability of berths,” he said.

According to official, the new interface will give graphical representation of the train coaches and berth-wise accommodation status on the Indian Rail Catering and Tourism Corp (IRCTC) website.

The railway officials said the new feature will look similar to that provided by the airlines.

The website of the Indian Railways will show the seating layout with different colours to show the seats that are booked, vacant and partially booked.

“The system displays the coach layout of nine classes used in the reserved trains of the Indian Railways and more than 120 different coach layouts have been incorporated. This feature displays class-wise and coach-wise fully vacant berth availability information as per the first chart of the train, which is prepared four hours before the train’s departure,” he said.

If the second chart is also prepared, then the option to view the details of vacant berths available at the time will be displayed. The second chart is prepared about 30 minutes prior to the departure of the train to accommodate the information of current reservations and cancellations done after the first chart, he added.

Both the charts will get updated for every charting location as the train heads towards its destination. In addition to this, a user will also have the facility to view the exact position of the berth allocated to a PNR in the graphical coach layout during PNR enquiry.

Girish Pillai, Member Traffic, Railway Board said that entire effort is to make reservation process as transparent as possible and comfortable to the public. “The biggest advantage is passenger can see which berth is available even after second charts are made,” he said.