The adventure that is the Indian rail system, part 1/?

Despite the fact that we are still in the US, our adventure has already begun. Because we want to travel around India by train (I don't do planes very happily, and Mu likes trains just fine, and besides, it's a lot cheaper), we have had the pleasure of dealing with the online booking system for Indian trains. Now, I know that I should be grateful for the fact that I can do this online at all, and believe me, I am. However, it doesn't mean that I enjoyed the process.

I should first give you an idea of the scale of this undertaking. Out of our 33 days total for this trip (which includes drive time to and from LAX), we will be sleeping on trains 9 of the nights, 7 of those in India and the other 2 in Thailand. In addition to that, we'll be taking a few daytime trains in India for the shorter hops. Since Indian trains are notoriously crowded and insane, and we want to be able to get good sleep as much as possible, all this meant that we had to book way ahead of time in order to make sure we got higher class tickets, which sell out quickly.

Indian train tickets go on sale 90 days out, so we, being organized and dorky, put reminders in our Google calendars to make sure we booked our tickets as quickly as possible. With the time difference, this was pretty convenient -- we would be booking at 7:30pm-ish, or so we thought. This did not, in fact, turn out to be the case. There were several other things that also did not turn out to be the case. :)

We had formulated our itinerary and figured out trains way ahead of time, so that we could just go online and book. The problems started there, though. The official Indian railway website does not allow booking without, get this, an Indian mobile number. Out of the rest of the booking sites, only one allowed the use of a non-Indian credit card, so by default, that's the one we ended up going with.

The very first day, we ran into issues. At 7:30pm, I went online, found my train, clicked the "check availibility" button, and was told that the system was not able to get data. Huh. I tried again. And again. And again. Nothing. Finally, I left to have dinner with a friend, and let Mu, who was in Texas, take over. An hour lateer, the system finally responded, huzzah! We had our first train ticket! Upon further googling, it turned out that the first hour of ticket sales is only accessible to agents in India, to book last-minute tickets. Why the site was unable to tell me this was unclear.

Over the next few weeks, we continued to run into random new and exciting errors on an almost daily basis, with the site giving us such informative error messages as "we're sorry, the system is grumpy" and "aargh! We couldn't find any trains!" Googling sometimes helped, but not always. Once, we found that it was impossible to book a train between the two stations we wanted. The train stopped at both stations, but one was not allowed to buy a ticket between the 2 -- instead of getting a ticket between station D and X, we had to buy tickets between D and Y, pay extra for the privilege, and get off a station early. Another time, we discovered that the direct train between 2 cities is cancelled in December and January due to fog, though we could still take trains around the foggy area. Yet another time, we couldn't book any tickets in 2012 because the external website's database hadn't caught up with the rail system's schedule. Some train numbers had randomly changed, apparently, and the systems were no longer in sync.

Finally, 3 weeks after we began, we got all our Indian rail tickets! We were so relieved, and hopeful that booking Thai trains would be easier. Hah. But that's a story for another post.