Many people find it extremely fascinating to pore over the Railway time table, especially while undertaking a train journey. The route that the train traverses through, the stations en route both significant and lesser known ones, the timings and the stoppages – all these are part of the romance of train journeys. The time table is something like the compass was for the early traveller or the star studded night sky for the seafarer.
Creating a time table for trains on a busy network like the Indian Railways is an extremely challenging task. Planners on the Zonal Railways work independently and then collaboratively with other Zonal level planners to design the All India time table. The two main objectives are that it should be convenient to the passenger and feasible to run on the system. Introducing new train services and augmenting older ones is an art and a select group of planners are highly skilled in this task. Indian Railways have now decided to provide software tools to aid the planning process. This is the purpose of the ‘Software Aided Train Scheduling and Network Governance’ project sanctioned in the Railway Budget of 2008-09.
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