Rajavilas on rails. The Golden Chariot luxury train is Karnataka’s answer to Rajasthan’s acclaimed Palace on Wheels

The eye-catching royal purple coaches draw attention at the Yeswantpur Railway Station in Bangalore. It is a train built for a different experience, and the colour on the exterior hints at the experience that guests can expect inside.

People on the platform stop near the coaches for a close look. Curiosity gets the better of them, and some inch closer to peep through the large glass windows. A few others try their luck with the staff for a peek inside. It’s the same story at all the stations the train stops at — Mysore, Hassan, Hospet, Gadag and, finally, Goa.

The Golden Chariot luxury train is Karnataka’s answer to Rajasthan’s Palace on Wheels and Maharashtra’s Deccan Odyssey. “But what differentiates us from the other two luxury trains is the variety of destinations the itinerary offers,” says Anand Menon, Director of the Golden Chariot project. On offer is a mix of historical, heritage, wildlife and beach destinations. And unlike the Palace on Wheels, where about 85-90 per cent of the guests are foreigners, 75-80 per cent of guests on the Golden Chariot are Indians and NRIs, he adds.

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http://www.blonnet.com/life/2008/09/26/stories/2008092650010100.htm

One more online booking site for indian trains

http://www.cleartrip.com/trains

Cleartrip, in partnership with IRCTC, announced the launch of online train bookings. With over 17 million passengers travelling daily by train, Cleartrip becomes India’s first online travel agency to tap this burgeoning market by enabling customers to book their train tickets online.

Cleartrip launched a search-only service in February 2008 and has steadily improved the offering based on feedback from thousands of users the search results from 3000 scaled up to 15000 in 6 months. As customer feedback poured in, Cleartrip added maps for stations and train routes, dateless searches to enable checking of railway schedules, connecting journeys where no direct train is available between stations. Registered users can even save their train searches, letting them conduct their regular searches again without having to re-enter information.

Cleartrip has created the easiest and fastest method for customers to purchase railway tickets online. Instead of having to check aspects of the booking separately, a single search provides users with train fares, schedules and availability simultaneously. Cleartrip lets users select the stations most convenient to them by offering multiple stations from a city instead of forcing users to specify a station and also allows the comparison of fares from multiple stations. In addition, users can instantly review fares from multiple classes such as AC 2-Tier and AC 3-Tier, letting them upgrade to a higher class of travel if they choose. Detailed information is provided for each train including arrival and departure times, number of stops and the train’s route with all stops.

In addition, a wide variety of payment options are supported, including credit cards, debit cards and net-banking, so virtually anyone can use this medium. All railway bookings made on Cleartrip are permanently stored in each user’s account, Users can also cancel their bookings online at any time.

“Cleartrip has always been very focused on making travel simple and with that mission we have designed the rail booking engine. The amount of data on railways is vast and we wanted a system that kept things simple, while delivering search results in under a second, and we’ve reinvented the wheel to create that system” said Hrush Bhatt, Founder & Director, Product and Strategy.

The government-owned Indian Railways boasts one of the largest and most trafficked railroad networks in the world—over 18,000 trains operate daily, plying across over 60,000 kilometres of railroad tracks and over 6,800 railway stations. “The sheer size and scale of the Indian Railways, made offering…

this article is from-Financial express

More features added in erail.in

erail.in has added some more features. They have added senior male and senior female fares in their site and also added exact fare option also . They have also added a forum for any query about indian trains. One more new feature is Trains at glance in excel sheet in very attractive way where you can search by table numer and also by train number. The most important feature they have added is passanger train in their search which is useful to passangers. Also added train departure and arrival from a particular station for next 24 hours, which give more comfort to the passanger to get full timetable of trains from a particular station. just choose your station from drop menu box or click on all stations and type your station name or station code and click on 24 hours tab (number 9) . The site is becoming more and more interactive with this features.