Way2Top

One of my colleague remarked about a mash-up called eRail.in, a service to search trains in a better way. The site simply abstracts the difficulties or unpleasant user experience that one faces in the official website of Indian Railways.

The way eRail.in accomplishes that is simple. Most of the information about Indian trains are static such as Train numbers, Station codes, Timings, Route, Price, Class etc., So they have scraped the data and made the search experience faster. The “availability” et al comes in to picture only after narrowing down the afore-mentioned parameters. At that point of time, the site simply connects you to the Indian Railways website.

Unlike the fares of Airlines, the fares of Railways remain fairly static. So there is no overhead for real-time fare extraction from different airlines(like ixigo does!).

I couldn’t figure out the person (or people) behind it. My guess is a techie, who did this to exhibit his Mash-up skills! Nevertheless, a good utility (in the context of relatively bad experience in Indian railways websites Train Enquiry & IRCTC).

UPDATE: 5Map is the company behind this initiative