Bangladesh Railway has started selling tickets in advance for the comfort of homebound people on Eid. Advance ticket sales have started as of Friday the sixth day. Western region train ticket sales started at 8 am. To facilitate the purchase of tickets for passengers, tickets for all inter-city trains in the western region are issued from 8 am and tickets for inter-city trains running in the eastern region are issued from 2 pm. Those who buy advance tickets today will be able to travel on April 8.
Not in the stations, rather 100% Eid travel advance tickets are being sold online. As a result, instead of going to the Kamlapur railway station in the early morning and making a long queue, now the passengers have entered the online war on their mobile phones and PCs. As early as 8 am, ticket aspirants flocked to the railway app or the web. Even if the server is running, the speed becomes slow. Even if you sign in, the ticket will be charged. Mahtab Uddin, a private professional, complains about the irony of registering a ticket, a new glitch in the railway ticketing system. I entered the server at exactly 8 o’clock and found all seats are available. But no seat could be selected! Earlier, it was not possible to enter the server and now it is easy to enter but the seat cannot be selected. This is what I have been observing for the past two days.
Another passenger complained that, in previous days, people used to go to the railway station at night, used to spend several hours awake at night ignoring mosquito bites. Even then, many times we could not get tickets. Now online tickets can be purchased from anywhere. But sometimes the app cannot be accessed.
One of the victims, who sent a video recording of the ordeal of booking a train ticket for the upcoming 7th April, said that despite signing in at exactly 8 o’clock, all the tickets were sold out within minutes, he said. I just selected one station and worked. This is the same situation for the last three days. Within two to three minutes, tickets are sold at the station. After that you will select any other station and search and see there is no seat available. All tickets are sold in two to three minutes!
But the next day luckily this same person said that he got the ticket. According to him, someone may have frowned at the return.
Acknowledging such online ticket wars, railway officials say there is demand for at least four lakh tickets every day. An average of 600 people tried to get each ticket in the first half an hour when train tickets went on sale in the morning. Amid this shortage, a little over 30,000 tickets of intercity trains are being sold every day. So, many passengers are not getting tickets.
Railway sources say that tickets for April 7 were sold yesterday. In the first half hour of ticket sales in the western region of the train this morning, 9.4 million hits were made and, in the afternoon, 7.45 million hits were made in the first half hour of the ticket sales in the eastern region. Earlier, tickets for the western zone hit around crores in the first half hour of the morning and 50 lakhs in the first half hour for the eastern zone.
It is known that on the occasion of Eid, the sale of tickets for this train journey started on March 24. In previous Eids, 5-day advance tickets were sold, but this time, the railways is selling 7-day advance tickets for the first time. On the fifth day, Thursday, 45,000 train tickets were sold in 10 hours. 44 thousand 952 tickets were sold across the country in 10 hours from 8 am to 6 pm. Besides, 27 thousand 900 outbound tickets have been sold from Dhaka. 82 lakh 50 thousand ticket aspirants hit the website between 8 am and 8:30 am. Western region train tickets have been sold at this time. And from 2 pm to 2:30 pm 74 lakh 50 thousand ticket aspirants hit the website. Eastern region train tickets have been sold at this time.
However, even if the ticket aspirants did not get tickets while buying tickets online, their working hours or travel expenses were not wasted. I didn’t have to spend a sleepless night.