Yesterday I was looking for a train Boarding from Delhi to Mumbai to book a ticket online through IRCTC. So i have just used the plan my travel and entered both the station along with the date and displayed several trains… seeing the list feels myself quite happy (why…. I though  there may be chances that I could be able to get a ticket in any of the train passing through as everyone in India must be aware of the fact that getting an available list of ticket is how much difficult in summers.)

But my joy was disappeared very soon as for the several train in the list I have to check each and every train to find whether seats are available or not? Ans sometimes it shows the service unavailable or server very busy massage in the middle of the process. It makes me irritate, then I first decided to look for any solution if it has and the result was the  Greasemonkeying script around with IRCTC.

For those who are not aware of what greasemonkey script is –  “It is a FireFox extension that “allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. With this script installed you can easily find the availability of the seats of each train in the same window along with list of al trains as shown below:

This intresting script has designed by Senthil Kumar’s mentioned at his blog at Greasemonkeying around with IRCTC and I found it a solution (though to some extent as there are lot more to do at IRCTC with the service unavailable at the peak hour 8 am to 8.30 am) to my irritation that has caused me while looking for the seats availability.

About the script mentioned, the script works by first adding a column to the train details table. It uses a XPath expression to get the list of train numbers from the HTML content and then queries availability information from the server by generating the same query string that a click on the “Show Availability” button generates. The difference is that it does it automatically for all trains in the page and that it uses GM_xmlhttpRequest to do the query asynchronously – which means that the script queries availability for trains (almost) simultaneously.

I have found this script very useful as it saves a lot of time while looking for each and every train for its availability. But to make this script work, you need to have greasemonkey installed over your system from the link here and then should proceed with the this script called http://senthilthecoder.com/software/irctcscripts/ajaxavailability.user.js

While you’re at it, you might also find SortItOut, a script for sorting the availability table (shown above), useful.

UPDATE: From the 15 of August you will no longer need any Grasemonkey script to get train availability as IRCTC is working very hard to give you much easier interface and they have redesigned its online booking system and everything you would like to know; whether it is complete trains list passing by the stations with seats availability or fare from a particular distance or the class selection, everything is now available on a single page… read more at the link given here

Here I am sure you would also love to read a major enhancement the booking time rescheduled Now Book online Railway Tickets before 8 am its 12.30 am… but no tatkal tickets

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