Indian rail passengers are now able to track their train in real time with a new SMS service.
Indian Railways and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur have launched the new service, which allows customers to find out where their train is simply by sending a text message.
The service is currently available for 36Â premier trains including Mumbai Rajdhani, Howrah Rajdhani, Dibrugarh Rajdhani, Sealdah Duronto and Shatabdi trains for Bhopal, Kanpur and Amritsar.
Indian Railways’ technology arm, Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with IIT-Kanpur for executing the project.
Indian Railways expects to extend this facility to all major trains in the next 18 months.
For this service, Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) S-Band mobile satellite service (MSS) on INSAT-3C and GPRS will be used.
Apart from launching the train tracking system through Trainenquiry.com in partnership with RailYatri.in, Railways is also working on a system that will track trains via GPS known as Satellite Imaging for Rail Navigation (SIMRAN).
The project has been in operation since October 2011 on selected trains. Users were able to track train locations either via simran.in or SMS.
The SIMRAN project is being built in collaboration by Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO), Lucknow and IIT Kanpur.
