About this site
trainchartvacancy.com is an independent Indian railway information site. It answers one question properly: when a train's reservation chart is prepared, and what happens to a waiting-list ticket at that moment. The train and station pages are built from one dated timetable feed of 10,594 trains, and the guides from published railway circulars. Nothing here is invented, and nothing is sold.
Last verified .
Who runs this site
This site is run by Vijesh Rathore.
He chooses what gets published here, checks the editorial pages against the circulars and rule documents they cite, and answers for anything on this site that turns out to be wrong. His name is the byline on every article for that reason: a site that tells you to doubt unsourced numbers should say who answers for its own.
Write to him at contact@trainchartvacancy.com. That mailbox was tested with a message from an outside account on 3 September 2026 and the message arrived. A correction that names the page, quotes the line and gives the published source that contradicts it is the most useful thing you can send.
Judge this site by its citations rather than its byline. Every claim names the document behind it, and the document outranks us. The corrections page sets out what happens to a report.
Why this site exists
Search for when a railway chart is prepared and you will be told four hours, eight hours, ten hours or a day, almost never with a source.
Every one of those answers was right at some point. The four-hour rule stood from October 2015. The timing then changed three times during 2025 alone. Most pages that rank today are frozen at whatever was true when they were written. Nobody tells you which document their answer came from, so nobody can tell you whether it still holds.
We decided to write the version that names the document behind each change, and says plainly which of those documents we have actually read and which we have only seen reported. That distinction is the whole point. It is also uncomfortable. The rule in force today rests on a Railway Board letter of 16 December 2025. We have never seen that letter, and it carries no circular number we can find. Our pages say so every time they state the rule.
What we publish
| What | Built from | Changes when |
|---|---|---|
| Chart preparation times | A published rule, applied to a train's scheduled departure | The Railway Board changes the rule |
| Train and station pages | One dated GTFS timetable feed | A newer feed passes our validation |
| Seat availability | A live query to a commercial data provider | Every check; each figure carries its IST fetch time |
| Explainers | Circulars, the 2015 refund rules, government releases | The underlying document changes |
| Legal and policy pages | Our own decisions about how the site behaves | We change how the site behaves |
A number that came from a live query is stamped with the time in IST at which we fetched it. If we do not have the number, we say so rather than show a zero. The full method is on how this site works, with the cache periods and the counts behind every inference. The feed's own defects are listed on data sources.
Where the data comes from
Train numbers, names, schedules, stations and running days come from a public GTFS feed, which we reprocess. That feed is a volunteer project. It carries no licence file and no promise of accuracy, and we read its code repository ourselves rather than take its word for what it holds. The feed is wrong in ways we can name: trips with no calendar, and timings no train could keep. Where that happens we mark the page or hold it back. We do not publish the error.
Live seat figures come from a commercial data provider, and are held on our server for a short time. We are not connected to the railway booking system and have no special access to it.
What we will not do
- We do not invent numbers. Nothing here is simulated or filled in to look complete. Where a time is worked out from a published rule rather than observed, the page says so. A gap is shown as a gap.
- We do not predict whether your ticket is going to clear. Ask anyone who offers you a confident percentage where that number came from, and over how many journeys.
- We do not sell tickets, book tickets, or act as an agent, and we never ask for a PNR, a phone number or a payment detail.
- We are not IRCTC, Indian Railways or CRIS, are not affiliated with them, and do not claim to be. See the disclaimer.
How to check us
A citation beats an argument, including ours. Every explainer ends with the documents it rests on, linked to the original rather than to a summary. If a page disagrees with the source it cites, the source is right, and we want to know.
Start with when the chart is prepared. That is the page the rest of the site hangs off. Or start with the terms of use, if you want to know what we promise and what we do not. The answer there is short: information, offered honestly, with its workings shown.
Sources
Every factual claim above was checked against these documents on .
- https://indianrailways.gov.in/railwayboard/uploads/directorate/traffic_comm/Comm_Cir_2025/MX-M453N_20250708_161959.pdf
- https://www.staffnews.in/2025/07/preparation-of-first-reservation-charts-cc-10-2025.html
- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2140614
- https://github.com/Neo2308/indianrailways-gtfs