RailEnquiry

KOLKATA: Passengers of the 18615 Howrah-Ranchi Hatia Express will be felicitated by the South Eastern Railway as part of its celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the computerized Passenger Reservation System (PRS) in Kolkata. This train was the first one under SER to be linked to the Kolkata PRS in 1987 when this facility was only available from four counters (two each of SER and Eastern Railway) at the New Koilaghat Street booking office. SER has also managed to track down 4-5 commercial clerks who were among the first to receive training and start issuing tickets through the PRS. They will be felicitated as well by SER general manager A K Verma.

After all, it wasn't an easy task for the booking clerks to shift from manual ticketing to the PRS. The two systems were completely dissimilar. Added to this was the opposition to computerization that was launched by the Left government in power in West Bengal at that time. There were regular demonstrations outside offices where computers were introduced.

"Today, there are five PRS centres across the country at New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Secunderabad. The Kolkata PRS now handles 700 trains of six zonal railways. It is connected to 1,000 PRS locations which have 2,500 booking counters. We are celebrating the silver jubilee celebrations of the PRS is a big way as it completely revolutionized railway booking. On Tuesday morning, our general manager even led a rally of 250 officers and employees to Howrah station to celebrate this occasion," an SER official said.

At first, the PRS counters could only issue outgoing tickets. It was in 1999 that all PRS centres got amalgamated and people could purchase tickets from any location to another from every counter. It was much later that the PRS was interlinked to the Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) and tickets started being issued online. Recently, it was through the PRS that tickets started being issued through mobile phones.