Book train tickets with app, take print at station via link

Mumbai: Now you can buy a ticket for your loved one from any part of the city with the Railway’s Unified Ticketing System (UTS) application. The application is a step towards railway’s integrated ticketing system that is expected to help it decrease the queues at ticket counters by providing a common ticket for multiple transport modes, including the metro. A passenger, who has the UTS app can also avail the SMS service by forwarding the message to their friends or family members, who can then use the link. On tapping the link, one can use the newly wall mall mounted Optical Character Response (OCR) machine to take a printout at stations.

Until now, only the person with the app could use the ticket for himself or needed to be physically present if they were booking the ticket for a friend. Two machines have been placed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and will be placed at Thane, Ghatkopar, Kalyan, Dombivali, Churchgate, Dadar, Bandra, Andheri and Borivali stations in the next two months. The plan is to eventually introduce the same on all Central and the Western Railway stations.

Uday Bobhate, general manager, CRIS , explained, “If you have the application but your family from out of town has landed at Dadar or CST station and does not know exactly how to go about it, then you can just send them the SMS after you have booked the ticket and the money is deducted and all they have to do is take a printout using the OCR machine and they are on their way.”

The printout scheme has been provided with a system to avoid duplication as the system allows only one print for a link.

Extending services

While the service is aimed at phones with Internet, the OCR machines have been brought in so that the facility can be extended to phones without Internet. The facility will be given in the form of unstructured supplementary service data (USSD). It means you can SMS the option like #01 to 5662 for booking a ticket from CSMT to Dadar.