IRCTC Special Trains Ticket Booking: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website — the online ticket booking portal of Railways — went unresponsive as booking for 15 special trains began Monday afternoon. Indian Railways is gradually restarting passenger trains operation from May 12 after they were suspended in view of the nationwide coronavirus-induced lockdown in March 2020.
The ticket bookings were supposed to start at 4 pm but the site was not working. However, responding to the delay, the Railway Ministry in a tweet said that data pertaining to special trains is being fed and that bookings will be available from 6 pm.
A total of 15 trains for different destinations will leave New Delhi on Tuesday for which bookings will begin today. The special trains will run from New Delhi to Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.
On Monday, the Home Ministry(HM) issued a standard operating procedure (SOP) for the movement of people by trains and made it clear that only asymptomatic and confirmed ticket holders will be allowed to travel. The fares of these trains will be that of Rajdhani trains, which means all these will be all air-conditioned coaches.
Passengers will have to reach 90 mins in advance in stations to board the trains.