The online reservation process of the Indian Railways is available in most user friendly form on the IRCTC website. The new and improved version of the website is much more simplistic and organized. It also has an increased capacity for handling web traffic which was a huge area of concern in the previous version and led to multiple booking failures. Many of the security and payment processing loopholes have also been efficiently dealt with in the new version.
Given the usability of this new avatar of the IRCTC web portal it is highly recommended that prospective travelers use online railway reservation to generate e-tickets. The ease and portability associated with the use of e-tickets is far greater than offline tickets. There is no added worry of taking care of a single piece of paper that guarantees your journey. If an online ticket gets misplaced somehow a new ticket can be generated with a few clicks of the mouse.
E-Tickets
Once the payment process for an online reservation is over an SMS and mail confirming the reservation is sent to the registered number and e-mail address of the user respectively. One can easily travel with this SMS. Although if one intends to keep a digital copy of ticket with him/her the option of saving an e-ticket in desired digital format like PDF or DOC is always available.
If at all the user feels the need to generate a hard copy of the ticket booked through IRCTC online reservation he/she can take a print out of the e-ticket by clicking on the print e-ticket option that appears after completion of reservation process.
Given the usability of this new avatar of the IRCTC web portal it is highly recommended that prospective travelers use online railway reservation to generate e-tickets. The ease and portability associated with the use of e-tickets is far greater than offline tickets. There is no added worry of taking care of a single piece of paper that guarantees your journey. If an online ticket gets misplaced somehow a new ticket can be generated with a few clicks of the mouse.
E-Tickets
Once the payment process for an online reservation is over an SMS and mail confirming the reservation is sent to the registered number and e-mail address of the user respectively. One can easily travel with this SMS. Although if one intends to keep a digital copy of ticket with him/her the option of saving an e-ticket in desired digital format like PDF or DOC is always available.
If at all the user feels the need to generate a hard copy of the ticket booked through IRCTC online reservation he/she can take a print out of the e-ticket by clicking on the print e-ticket option that appears after completion of reservation process.