Other passenger friendly amenities include augmenting the capacity of premier Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains with addition of additional coaches as a regular feature. This will increase chances of getting confirmed tickets in these prestigious trains where wait-listed passengers cannot travel. This is also intended to increase chances of getting reserved tickets during peak travel seasons.

Yet another important passenger amenities relate to introduction by Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to start ticket bookings in various languages to enlarge accessibility of rail ticket bookings to people from all walks of life.

With such increased passenger amenities Indian Railways will be able to minimize growing loss of passengers in view of stiff competition from ever growing low cost airlines, especially in view of new aviation policy seeking to expand such airlines to smaller and hitherto unreached tier ii and tier iii cities and towns.

Be it as it may, it is worrying rail passengers that the menace of touts in ticket reservations including Tatkal tickets continues unabated. Despite periodic efforts and campaign by vigilance wings of zonal railways with the help of Government Railway Police (GRP) and Railway Protection Force (RPF), fruitful results are not noticeable on the ground. Such raids to nab touts appear to be staged managed, as there is no relief to passengers in exigencies. It is happening unabated with impunity under a culture of collusion between unscrupulous elements in Passenger Reservation System (PRS) across the country despite the best possible software in place. The crooks manage to dodge the system to misappropriate tickets at hefty costs to needy passengers.

Yet another grey area and never surmountable passenger amenities is cleanliness, poor catering service both hygienically and quantitively for common passengers, despite pontification to the contrary by successive Railway Ministers, sees no perceptible improvement!