Railways readies to restart pre-Covid level services, reservation system to be shut at night for 7 days

Good news for all railway passengers! The Indian Railways are planning to normalise passenger services the way it was before COVID 19. AS a part of this process, the Railways Passenger Reservation System (PRS) will be closed for 6 hours for the next 7 days.

The system will be closed from 11.30 pm to 5.30 am from the night of November 14 to the night of November 21, the Minister of Railways confirmed in their statement. The statement also said that a massive number of old train numbers and passengers’ booking data for mail and express trains will be updated hence the process will take time. All of it has to be done carefully. To avoid customer hassle, the ministry has planned to implement this during night hours so that there is no hindrance in ticket booking.

During the shutdown, one can’t operate any PRS service like ticket reservation, booking cancellation, current booking, enquiries etc. The statement also said that during this, railway employees will make sure the charting of trains and other 139 PRS services is uninterrupted and running smoothly. Early on Friday, the Railway board informed us that they will be going back to pre-COVID 19 fares. The timings of all the mail and express trains will be the regularised and the fares will go back to how it was, the Railway Board said in a letter to the principal chief commercial managers.

They also added that the second class of these trains will continue to run as usual except if there is any special relaxation permitted for unique cases. Around 1,700 mail or express trains were functional before the COVID 19, after the pandemic all these trains and their services were halted. However, some trains were restarted tagging them as special trains when the pandemic started to normalise. The fares are likely to increase up to 30%.

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