Increase your chances of booking ticket from IRCTC

This is a story of all most every one who will wake up early to book a ticket from IRCTC through the Tatkal Scheme.

This is what happens!

1. One would wake up and open the browser at least 10 mins prior to 8:00 AM (The Tatkal booking on the IRCTC website opens at 08:00 hours a day in advance excluding the day of journey from the train’s source station)

2. One is happy to see the speed of the site. Because its not 8:00 AM YET!!!!

3. DONG DONG.........its 8:00 AM -- and suddenly the speed of IRCTC goes feel as if your machine has hung up it self....your frustration level starts start looking here and there and then would open another window / tab.

4. To your surprise, you are asked to re-login.....and then the wait wait ... wait ... wait long before you see the booking page under your login..

5. You try to quickly put the start station, end station...but can not do nothing...because, you are waiting for that station drop down to appear before you can proceed...your wait continues....

6. Finally, when you see the area where you can fill the passenger details - you scramble around to quickly add the details....and press pay...

7. Wait either see "page can not be displayed" or "the login screen" or "nothing" .....

8. You repeat your steps from step 4 and keep doing it till one fine time either your card gets charged but while coming back to success page you see one of page of step 7.

And if you are very lucky you can book a ticket (you feel so proud, lucky that today one may skip the morning job / exercise because you have already done a lot!)

Else, if belongs to the remaining 98% of normal people - we end up calling the agent and seek his help.

However, there is a ray of light here.....we can reduce some work and save crucial time at step 6. because the website operates on a first-come first-served basis so if you can fill the reservation form in lesser amount of time, it may improve your chances of getting a train ticket.

Here Magic Autofill can help. It’s a simple online tool that will fill the passenger details form on the IRCTC website with the click of a button thus saving vital time.

Go to around ten minutes prior to the opening of the booking window and complete the form – its an almost replica of the form that’s available on the IRCTC. Once you’ve filled the passenger details, hit I’m Feeling Lucky and the tool will generate a Magic Autofill button that you need to drag to your bookmarks toolbar.

Now when you are on IRCTC site to book tickets, just click the same Magic Autofill button on your bookmarks toolbar and there you are - got all things auto filled up. The reservation form is filled automatically and you can directly proceed to the payment screen.

Actually, one is pre-filling a form and saving it as a bookmark. Hence, next when one is  on the actual form, one would click the bookmark to transfer the previously filled values to your new form.

Hope to see we are able to book tickets with some ease now!



  1. IRCTC have to meet the demand of ticket booking aspirants, the web site is too slow and completing a transaction is time-consuming, with the rise in demand is evident from the large number of failed transactions.There is an urgent need to improvise the IRCTC's e-ticketing facility.

  2. Ha Ha Hahhahahahahahahaha.......... for last 2 days we are trying to book a tatkal ticket in IRCTC..... I was not able to login into IRCTC. Went to the Ticket counter and got to see 100's of people waiting to book ticket...... Tried with Bus ticket, which use to be 800 for Volvo now costing 2000.... We now made up our minds, not to travel.....This is the way all Organizations working together to save our money

  3. If Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter etc can handle heavy traffic and not crash even once, why can't IRCTC handle the traffic. IRCTC is getting crores of money on just cancellation of tickets and commission, they can easily upgrade their system if they have a real will to do that.