IRCTC Ticket Booking - Tips and Tricks

Of late many stories and articles have been published in the media about the misuse of tatkal scheme by touts and travel agents. This to my knowledge is very much true.
Yet I have successfully managed to book tatkal tickets from irctc website, and I do it regularly for my personal use. Here is how I do it:

• I always use Mozilla Firefox as my internet web browser for booking tickets online. mozilla somehow communicates better, persists with the irctc.co.in server and gives very few timeout errors. 
• Please do not forget to install a very useful script from greasemonkey. the scrip is called 'auto refesh'.
• Login to your account (now https://www.irctc.co.in/eticketing/loginHome.jsf) web account atleast 30 minutes before the tatkal booking opens. By the way takal booking open at 10:00AM so you should login preferably at 9:30AM.
• When the first page opens do not type anything and keep your page refreshing at the regular intervals( within 3 minutes) if you have not installed auto refresh script.
• You will notice that as the booking open time approaches your page takes longer to load after each refresh. Please ensure your last refresh at 10:00 AM is around 9:58 or 9:59AM.
  
  
• When you notice that time in the bar as shown above is 10:00AM or more, process your booking accordingly. The faster the better, as you are competing with thousands others it is better to have a faster internet connection, good speed PC/Laptop and quick fingers to type faster.
• You will also need an ID detail of the traveller to fill in so keep the details handy before you jump in.

All the best.

IRCTC Trolled

IRCTC one of the giant e-commerce of Asia is making millions or can say billions of Rupees may be because of its high demand in India (The second most populated Country of World till now). Despite being a slow and ir-responsive website its is used daily by lakhs of Indians because they have no other option other than travelling by trains. Bad roads and lack of security are main reasons. Also, the railway provides less facility and less seats to travel.

Railway sector has a great share of showing bad side of India to tourist. In spite of the fact that they charge more than normal for tickets their facilities are worst. Railway sector makes crores of profit yearly but never thinks to improve its infrastructure, introducing new and latest technology trains and of course the condition of stations.

Though the site has earned the medal of top e-commerce site but it is still too bad at providing online facilities even. 60% to 80% of public using IRCTC to book ticket online get errors like service unavailable, multiple login, session timeout, and sometimes payment gets done but ticket does not. This enables the thugs and agents to leech innocent passengers' money. Middlemen on the railway stations and near ticket booking widows are a common site. Time and again it has been brought to the notice of authorities that such people should be blocked access to railway stations and discouraged by imposing heavy penalties on them if found indulging in such activities. But authorities are yet to come to the terms and accept their fault.