OREANDA-NEWS. October 19, 2011. Advanced Communication and Information Technologies have revolutionalised the ways we do our business. Indian Railways is no exception. Customer expectations have risen. Yesterday's better services are today's basic necessities. Availability of accurate train running information on a click of a button is one such facility public would love to have.

Train information dissemination through 139 in the existing Train Information System over Indian Railway, being dependent on manual collection & feeding of train running information has certain limitations.

To overcome limitations of the existing Train Running Information System, it was decided to develop GPS based train tracking system jointly by RDSO & IIT-Kanpur. The system has been developed and working successfully in number of trains. It has now been decided to open the Real-time Train Information System (RTIS) to public in few trains to begin with effect from today i.e.19 October 2011. Minister of Railways Shri Dinesh Trivedi inaugurated this facility during the Economic Editors Conference being held here.

RTIS system deployed in the trains mentioned above will provide the
following information to public/passengers:
(i) Train locations.
(ii) Train running position (i.e. whether train is running on time or if running late and by how much.
(iii) Train location with respect to next stopping station in terms of kms.

This information will be available on website “http://www.simran.in”. Public may also get the train running information through SMS by sending a text message “ <train number>” to mobile number 09415139139. A typical message received by passenger say for train number 12004, a Shatabdi Exp. train, is as under:-

" On 19/10/2011 10:00, Train 12004 N Delhi – Lucknow Shat. is running at 129 kmph near Bharthana, 126 km from KANPUR CENTRAL. Presently Right on time "

The above message is actual reply received to a SMS querry.

Ministry of Railways has decided to implement RTIS to track all trains, passenger as well as freight trains. For this, a work has been approved in Railway Budget 2011 at a cost of Rs. 110.0 Cr. The project is likely to be completed by Dec.’ 2012.