People find it difficult to buy railway tickets online

Train crosses Padma Bridge on trial run

Jehangir Hussain

Due to complications in the Railway’s server people found it difficult to buy advanced railway tickets ahead of the Eid for the second day on Saturday.

It was for the second day that they faced such difficulties and many of them were compelled to buy ticket on the black market.

When the ticket sales started at 8:00 am on the Bangladesh Railway website and the Rail Sheba app, passengers faced problems due to complications in the servers of Shohoz.com, which is in charge of selling railway tickets. 

 Golam Yusuf said on Saturday he tried in vain to buy ticket for Mohonganj bound train.

“From  8:00 am on Saturday, I tried to purchase a ticket of Mohonganj Express train trough Bangladesh Railway website but I failed after  trying for two hours,” he said.

Rubel Ali said, “I entered the server at exactly 8:00 and selected seat no 27 in ‘NEO’ compartment. But it was blinking.  I'm trying to enter the laptop with my father's ID, now that seat is showing booked. As the server is down, so where the seats are going?”

MD Javed wrote, “The server could not be logged for last two hours, but tickets are being sold.”

Another person named Bakhtiar Rahman wrote that the server could not be accessed.

Passengers expressed their anger on social media failing to buy railway tickets online.

Tickets of four intercity trains running from Dhaka to Rajshahi –Padma, Silk City, Dhumketu and Banalata Express also could not be bough online by many people.  

About the suffering of the passengers, Zubair Ahmed, Vice-president of Shohoz-Synesis-Vincen JV, said, “There was no problem with the server. More than 26 thousand tickets were sold in one day.”

He said, “I wouldn't call it direct hacking. We believe black marketers had been selling tickets for the past 30 years. Now as more than one ticket is not available in NID card. They are probably trying to log in from different IDs repeatedly.” 

“To make the job even faster, our team is building a filter application that can filter out machine-generated logins,” he added.

jehangirh01@gmail.com