The Unsung Heroes Behind India’s Railway Reservation Revolution

By Anil P. Kastuar,Editor

From Handwritten Ledgers to a Digital Railway: The Engineers Who Quietly Changed How India Travels

Every day, millions of Indians book railway tickets with a few taps on a smartphone or clicks on a computer.

The process appears effortless.

Select a train. Choose a class. Enter passenger details. Pay. The ticket arrives.

But behind that seemingly simple transaction lies a remarkable four-decade story of Indian engineering—one involving railway officials, programmers, systems engineers and technology specialists who worked largely away from the public spotlight.

They were, in many ways, the unsung heroes of Indian Railways’ digital revolution.

Their achievement began when computers were still unfamiliar to most railway passengers, telecommunications were painfully slow and reliable nationwide computer networks were little more than an ambition.

When a Railway Ticket Meant Paper, Pens and Registers

In the early 1980s, railway reservations depended heavily on manual processes.

Reservation clerks worked with physical records and charts to determine berth availability, record bookings and prepare tickets. India’s enormous railway network made the task increasingly difficult as passenger numbers and long-distance travel grew.

The need for computerisation was therefore not simply a matter of convenience. It was becoming an operational necessity.

Indian Railways began experimenting with computerised passenger reservation, eventually joining hands with Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC) for the development of a system that could automate important reservation functions.

The challenge was extraordinary for its time.

There was no cloud computing, no modern internet and no nationwide high-speed data network. Engineers had to make the available computing hardware and telecommunications infrastructure work for one of the world’s largest railway systems.

15 November 1985: A Small Beginning With a Huge Consequence

On 15 November 1985, the pilot of the Integrated Multiple Train Passenger Reservation System (IMPRESS) was launched at New Delhi.

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s documented history records that the pilot was introduced on Northern Railway and was developed in association with CMC. Its objective included providing reserved accommodation from any connected counter, preparing train charts and accounting for reservation revenue.

The first implementation covered only a small number of trains.

But technologically, it was a giant step.

Contemporary technical accounts identify the early system with VAX-11/750 computers running VMS, with the software written in FORTRAN.

The engineers were not building a modern app.

They were building the foundation of a national transaction-processing system with computing resources that, by today’s standards, appear extraordinarily limited.

That makes the achievement even more remarkable.

The First Generation Was Not Perfect—and That Was the Point

The early reservation system had limitations.

The pilot’s capacity was eventually tested by growing demand, and the system had to be enhanced. IMPRESS evolved considerably, with subsequent implementations at major railway centres.

The documented rollout included Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai in 1987, followed by Secunderabad in 1989.

But a new problem emerged.

The railway had successfully computerised reservation centres—but those centres were still largely separate.

Delhi had its system.

Mumbai had its system.

Kolkata had its system.

Chennai had its system.

Secunderabad had its system.

The railway had entered the computer age, but the computers themselves had not yet become one national reservation network.

The “Island Problem”

This was the next great challenge.

A passenger travelling across India does not think in terms of railway IT regions.

A traveller in one city may want to board a train originating thousands of kilometres away.

The reservation system therefore needed to know, in real time, whether a particular berth was already sold somewhere else.

This meant solving a difficult distributed-computing problem at a time when communications infrastructure was vastly less capable than today’s networks.

The engineers had to connect geographically separated systems while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of reservation data.

That is where the work of CRIS — the Centre for Railway Information Systems — became crucial.

CRIS was constituted by the Ministry of Railways in 1986 as an autonomous organisation for railway computerisation activities, according to CRIS’s own records.

The Unsung Heroes Enter the National Stage

The names of individual programmers who wrote and maintained thousands of lines of early railway software are largely unknown to ordinary passengers.

Yet their work affected the daily lives of millions.

CRIS’s own history records that during the early years of railway IT, its teams worked with technologies including FORTRAN, Clipper, LISP, BASIC, dBASE and IBM mainframes, while passenger reservation systems were developed on VAX platforms using FORTRAN.

These engineers had to think about problems that remain familiar to today’s software architects:

• How should transactions be processed reliably?
• How can two users be prevented from obtaining the same seat?
• What happens when a communication link fails?
• How can a system continue operating when hardware crashes?
• How can data remain synchronised across geographically distant locations?
• How can the system be expanded without rebuilding everything from scratch?

They were solving these problems decades before terms such as cloud architecture, distributed systems and digital scalability became everyday technology vocabulary.

CONCERT: Connecting India’s Railway Reservation Islands

The next major technological milestone was CONCERT — Country-wide Network for Computerised Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing.

CRIS developed CONCERT to overcome the limitations of the earlier independent reservation systems. Official and technical histories document the system’s staged deployment during the 1990s.

According to a detailed technical history, CONCERT was implemented first at Secunderabad in 1994, followed by Delhi and other major centres, with the five major PRS systems becoming interconnected in 1999.

The communications infrastructure of that era was a world away from today’s broadband and fibre networks.

Technical accounts record the use of leased communication lines and later satellite communication technology to improve connectivity and reach difficult locations.

The engineers therefore had to design systems that could tolerate the realities of Indian infrastructure.

A dropped connection could not simply mean “try again later.”

A reservation transaction involved a real passenger, a real berth and often a journey that could determine whether someone reached a job interview, examination, hospital, family function or business meeting.

18 April 1999: The Network Became National

One of the most important milestones came when the five major PRS nodes were interconnected.

Technical documentation records the interconnection of the five systems on 18 April 1999, marking the culmination of the effort to create a nationwide computerised reservation network.

This was a watershed moment.

The railway reservation system was no longer simply a collection of computerised regional systems.

It was becoming a national digital infrastructure.

And the people who built it rarely became household names.

These Were India’s Digital Infrastructure Pioneers

Today, when we speak about India’s technology achievements, the conversation often centres on startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, smartphones and cloud computing.

But India’s digital transformation has a much older story.

The railway reservation engineers were working with primitive hardware and limited connectivity while dealing with an exceptionally complicated real-world system.

They had to understand railway operations as well as computing.

Their software had to understand trains, routes, stations, quotas, classes, berths, fares, cancellations, chart preparation and countless operational rules.

This was not merely a programming exercise.

It was software engineering married to railway engineering.

That is why the people behind IMPRESS, PRS and CONCERT deserve to be remembered as among the unsung heroes of Indian Railways.

Then Came the Internet

The next transformation was the arrival of internet-based railway booking.

IRCTC eventually brought railway reservations to the web, taking the experience beyond physical reservation counters.

The underlying reservation infrastructure continued to evolve.

In 2014, CRIS commissioned the Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) system for IRCTC’s online reserved-ticket services. Indian Railways’ Year Book records that the system was subsequently strengthened and that, in FY 2023-24, an average of about 14 lakh tickets were booked daily through the e-ticketing website, mobile apps and authorised agents.

The transformation was now complete in the eyes of the passenger.

The railway reservation counter had effectively moved into the pocket.

From a Few Trains in Delhi to Millions of Digital Transactions

Consider the distance travelled.

In 1985, computerisation began as a pilot at one location.

In the years that followed, the system expanded across major cities, was networked nationally and eventually became the technological foundation for a huge digital booking ecosystem.

Indian Railways’ own recent documentation says the PRS now serves more than 20.5 lakh passengers every day through multiple booking channels, while the existing reservation system has been designed for a very different technological era.

The scale is staggering.

And yet most passengers never see the engineers who make those transactions possible.

The Next Revolution Is Already Underway

The story is not over.

Indian Railways is now upgrading its reservation infrastructure to a cloud-enabled, next-generation Passenger Reservation System.

According to the latest Ministry of Railways information released through the Press Information Bureau, the upgraded PRS is designed to handle more than 1.5 lakh ticket bookings per minute, compared with about 32,000 under the existing setup.

Its enquiry capacity is planned to rise from around 4 lakh enquiries per minute to more than 40 lakh.

The new system is also intended to provide greater scalability, flexibility and reliability, along with a multilingual and more user-friendly interface.

A redesigned IRCTC website has also been introduced, with the beta version launched in July 2026 featuring a simpler interface, fewer booking steps and improved availability information.

The Numbers Are Impressive. The People Behind Them Are More So.

The modern passenger may see only a website, an app or a confirmation message.

But behind that screen is a technological lineage stretching back more than four decades.

From CMC engineers working on IMPRESS…

To railway technologists developing PRS…

To CRIS engineers connecting regional systems through CONCERT…

To the teams that built and strengthened NGeT…

And now to the engineers developing the cloud-enabled next-generation PRS…

Each generation inherited the problems solved by the previous one and pushed the system further.

Remember the Unsung Heroes

India’s railway reservation revolution did not happen overnight.

It was not created by one company, one software release or one celebrated technology entrepreneur.

It was built incrementally by teams of engineers, railway officers, programmers, systems specialists and support personnel who worked through hardware limitations, unreliable communications and enormous operational complexity.

Many of their names are unknown to the travelling public.

Their software, however, touches the lives of millions.

That is why the story of Indian railway computerisation should not merely be remembered as a story of technology.

It should also be remembered as a tribute to the unsung heroes of Indian Railways.

They took the railway reservation system from ink and paper to terminals, from terminals to networks, from networks to the internet, and now from legacy infrastructure to the cloud.

And they did something even more important:

They demonstrated that world-class digital infrastructure could be engineered in India, under Indian conditions, to serve the world’s largest and most complex passenger railway ecosystems.

The next time a railway ticket appears on a mobile phone within seconds, it is worth remembering that behind that simple confirmation lies decades of Indian engineering history—and generations of largely invisible people who made it possible.

They may not have stood at the railway platform to wave the flag of this technological revolution. But they built the system that keeps millions of journeys moving.

Fact-check note

A few details in the original version have been deliberately corrected or qualified here. In particular, official records place the constitution of CRIS in 1986, not 1982; the documented IMPRESS pilot date is 15 November 1985; and the evidence supports the five-node CONCERT network being interconnected in 1999.

The 1.5 lakh bookings per minute figure is presented as the capacity targeted for the upgraded next-generation PRS, not as a claim that the old system has already been processing that volume. The latest government material also gives the existing capacity as about 32,000 bookings per minute.

Key references

• Comptroller and Auditor General of India — Report No. 11 of 2007 (Railways), Chapter 1: Computerised Passenger Reservation System — documents the 1985 IMPRESS pilot, CMC involvement and subsequent expansion.
• Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) — official history of early railway IT and IMPRESS.
• CRIS Annual Report / Ministry of Railways — records CRIS’s constitution in 1986 and its railway IT responsibilities.
• Indian Railways Year Book 2023-24 — provides official statistics on NGeT and e-ticketing.
• Press Information Bureau / Ministry of Railways, 2026 — current information on the cloud-enabled next-generation PRS and its planned capacity of more than 1.5 lakh bookings per minute.