By Arun Kumar Das
New Delhi, Sept 11: Ahead of the upcoming festival season, more than 20 lakh train tickets were booked in advance on September 7 by IRCTC, a record for a single day booking.
Catering to the festive rush, heavy advance bookings continued on September 8 also with 19,50,699 tickets sold on that day.
According to IRCTC, the ticketing arm of Indian Railways, a number of significant steps continued to be undertaken to upgrade the rail ticket booking system including introduction of new UI beta version operational from July 15 this year.
At present about 89 per cent of total reserved tickets are being booked through online mode. Leading to these constant upgrades, on September 7, IRCTC recorded its highest-ever historic single-day booking of 20,06,353 tickets owing to festive season advance booking.
Due to these persistent efforts, the system continues to sustain a high load of booking during festive rush, IRCTC maintained.
During the festive season last year, 18,40,203 tickets were booked in a single day on September 19, 2025.
As per the present trend only 8.43 per cent to 14.14 per cent of the day’s bookings are completed during the first hour from 8 AM to 9AM in the morning and over 85 per cent of bookings are completed successfully later in the day.
The first 15 minutes (8:00–8:15 AM) consistently record the highest booking volume, reflecting peak concurrent demand.
According to IRCTC, several measures are being undertaken to achieve the record booking which include a comparative assessment of server capacity has been carried out with respect to pre-refresh and post-refresh infrastructure.
The capacity of the entire ecosystem has been enhanced to approximately double through induction of new servers in place of old servers. In addition to hardware augmentation, substantial capacity enhancement, manifold increase over the earlier system, has also been achieved through software optimization and architectural improvements.
Despite exceptionally high concurrent demand there has been no failure or outage of the IRCTC platform.
Booking statistics demonstrate that the platform remained up and running while processing a very high volume of simultaneous requests in a secure and equitable manner.
IRCTC maintains that it is fully committed to serve its users by bringing in constant upgrades to the Indian Railways online ticket booking system. (BVI)
