Railways publishes its all-India timetable after three-year gap; How to get a copy | So Good News

Only All India Train Guide Today

Before 1976, the railways brought out divisional time tables for each of the then nine geographical divisions and also issued what was known as an All-India Railway Time Table.

This was just a compilation of all the divisional editions together – with no attempt to rework the content so that a single train route could be followed from end to end in one table.

The Train in an instant or KEYWORDS solved this problem, but until today it only shows express trains and the passenger trains are left to the divisional timetables which are now reduced to six.

They have become hard to come by – and TAG remains the only all-India train guide today.

It has improved greatly over the years and the latest edition contains all the essential information for rail travellers, such as full timetables for around 1,400 trains, booking and cancellation information as well as details of many special trains and tourist packages, down to the detailed menus served on each train .

Sensible color coding makes it easy to distinguish and follow the routes of mail, express, super fast and special trains like Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Jan Shatabdi, Duronto and Garib Rath.

The recently introduced Vande Bharat trains are listed but not yet identified in the lists (although the number has grown since the publication of the guide to four, with the fifth, Mysuru–Bengaluru–Chennai), due to start on 10 November.

Online timetables

TAG-2022 is also available for free, online. IRCTC has listed all online divisional timetables pertaining to six railway divisions as well as the local or suburban trains in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad. You can find them here.

Train enthusiasts will remember that India had its own “Bradshaw”, first published in 1868. Titled “Indian Bradshaw”it had no known connections with British Bradshaw and was sourced from Kolkata by W. Newman and Co.

It remained for many decades, the only guide to passenger trains in pre-independence India and continued to publish its annual editions until quite recently.

An excellent blog titled “The Decline of the Indian Bradshaw” traces the release all the way to 2017 and reproduces the cover of the 2016 edition.

It is not clear whether the publication has appeared since – and this correspondent would like to update this piece with any information that readers, especially in Kolkata, may have about any subsequent editions of Indian Bradshaw.

Even when the original United Kingdom Bradshaw stopped publishing, Thomas Cook, the traveling people, used to bring out two railway timetables, a European Rail Time Table and Overseas Time Table covering other countries in the US, Australia Asia including timetable for India.

This too ceased in August 2013. However, former Thomas Cook employees bought the rights to the title and today their company brings out an annual jumbo-sized book called the European Rail Time Table (ERT) which costs around $40 (Rs 3,200).

In a section called Beyond Europe, they also cover important trains in India.