Now, you don’t have to wait in a queue to purchase a suburban railway ticket in any part of the city. The Southern Railway has expanded the paperless ticket on mobile facility to all the stations.
The facility is now available on all lines from Chennai Beach to Gummidipoondi, Chennai Beach to Tiruvallur, Chennai Beach to Velachery and Chennai Beach to Chengalpattu. Passengers having the ‘UTS on mobile application’ on their smart phones can now book their tickets from any station to any destination on the suburban network and carry the ticket on their phones.
With this, the Mobile Ticketing Application is fully functional. For details, visitwww.utsonmobile.
indianrail.gov.in. “Chennai is the first city to have this facility on Indian Railways,” said an official.
In the first phase of this initiative that was introduced in January 2015, passengers had to get their online tickets printed using ATVM at the station where they began the journey. In the second phase, the Railway Ministry, along with the Centre for Railway Information Systems, updated its application, ‘UTS on mobile’ allowing passengers to book their suburban journey tickets online and carry only an image of it as proof. However, this was available only for stations between Chennai Egmore and Tambaram.
Payment for tickets should be made through the Railway wallet which can be loaded either at station counters or through IRCTC using debit/credit cards. Though passengers welcome the move, they are sceptical about how long it would operate without any glitches. “We face problems while booking tickets on IRCTC. The railways must ensure that such issues don’t occur,” said Rajesh Ratnam, a resident of Perambur.
