Be it for the tea vendor who is serving you tea or the bangle seller who has just entered the train to sell his wares or the pantry helpers and compartment caretakers or even fellow passengers – we all have one pertinent question:
“Bhaisaab, yeh train kahan hai?”

The answer is here in a new web application, http://railradar.trainenquiry.com, which helps you track your train on a Google map in real time.

On October 9, Indian Railways launched online application RailRadar, which helps one find the exact geographical location of about 6,500 trains. The railways operates more than 10,000 trains every day. The system enables a colour code method as trains highlighted in blue indicate those that are running on time while the red markers indicate the trains that are delayed or behind schedule.

Even when you are not travelling, you can plan your travel by checking out the trains that ply on the intended route, choose the train which follows the shortest path and the train that is most punctual. The best part is that you get to see everything, on a map without having to struggle through large amounts of textual data.

Sunil Bajpai, group general manager, Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) and the man behind RailRadar, expressed the need for a graphical show of information in the railways because people today need to know much more about things around than ever before. According to Bajpai, this is just the beginning and as more and more people use the application, it will be able to provide much more information and facilitate their travel to a larger extent.

RailRadar has the potential to change the way people travel in future. “You can check if you are passing through a station where people play colours violently during Holi and adequately prepare yourself by shutting the windows two stations in advance,” says Bajpai. Adds Manish Rathi, cofounder of StellingTech Mobility Solutions, a technology company which is working closely with CRIS to develop RailRadar, “If I have to go to the station to pick up my mom, I don’t just need to know the time of arrival of the train; I need to know when it has passed the nearest station to my home so that I can plan to leave home accordingly.”

With RailRadar, you do not have to remember the train number or train timings or any such details apart from just the origin and terminal stations. Key in the details and you will see all the trains between the stations, which by the way is not the most interesting feature of the new service. You get to click on the trains and watch them on the map complete with the station they are on (or have just crossed); the time of arrival at the next station; the part of the distance they have covered and the distance that remains to be covered.

RailRadar tracks trains through a host of tracking systems such as GPS trackers and manual data entry trackers. This position is relayed to a central information system which is the data which reflects on the website. This is not real-time information and at given point, the position of the train is five or more minutes delayed than its actual position. This automatically indicates that informing the position of the train was not intended to be the primary function of the application.

Many systems which performed similar purposes of tracking and determining the position of the train preceded RailRadar. Take, for example, the Satellite Imaging for Rail Navigation (SIMRAN) which was started by the railways in collaboration with the IIT, Kanpur, in October 2011, but was shut down in 2012. Truly speaking, it was not a satellite but a GPS tracker and the name, as Bajpai says, “was coined to make a good acronym rather than be the representative of the function”. This was a small project and as a start only tracked 36 trains, such as Shatabdi and Duronto.

There is another train tracking system in Chennai which is experimenting with satellite imaging using the INSAT 3C satellite which tracks around 360 trains today. Railways is planning a rollout of train information systems which will be based on satellite as well as GPS information soon; the official decision has already been taken by the railway board.

Does it cater exclusively to internet users? Bajpai says that the railways provides the same information (about the position of the train) via SMS (and via call) on the number 139 for which it receives a few thousand SMSes every day. However, the queries on the internet surpass this number by a huge margin. He adds that though people in India might not be accessing the internet via the traditional PC and broadband devices, internet on mobile phones more than makes up for that deficit. He says, “We have to look at that population and prepare for a mature smart-phone user population tomorrow."

Though there is still a mobile application to be built for RailRadar, the web one can be checked in your phone’s web browser without any problem.

Railways is an operations driven department and works on a level of complexity that is hard to imagine for an average individual. It works on a lot of data that is collected for every level of the running of the train. Bajpai says, “I publish 150 reports every day on the behaviour of the system operationally; the reports are prepared in terms of distance, train types, division, region, causes (which might have delayed the trains). These reports are analysed every day to improve the performance of the railways on a day-to-day basis.”

Rathi says this information needs to be simplified for the people to make sense out it. No one can predict what a set of data might reveal or tell us because people can combine, correlate and analyse information to get to know things that they want to know. Both Bajpai and Rathi consider RailRadar as just a beginning, something that will soon take a life of its own and become an indispensable tool for all train travellers in India. A lot of work has to be done on that; user data has to be collected, understood, analysed and new features have to be developed. For example, one of the features on RailRadar is a metrics on the top right hand corner showing the percentage of trains on time and the number of active trains at any instant. In future, this can develop to be something that can pull them up to be more efficient than what they are today. No one knows what that metrics will do but just that the data is out there for everyone to see makes an impressionable difference in its impact.

But can’t this precise information about the running of trains be misused by terrorists? Concerns about RailRadar being a security threat are being overplayed, says Bajpai. The trains and their schedules are declared two years in advance and if someone wants to cause a mishap, he already knows what he needs to know. “Just because we run trains on a schedule, that should not become a security threat,” he says.

“People should be able to recognise what actually comes under the purview of national security,” he added.
Rathi says that he is still watching how people are reacting to RailRadar and still learning about the kind of features that can be built in it. He sees it as a future one-stop shop for all railways-related queries for the passengers. As of now, he is just watching and observing and collecting and analysing data for future use.