Ireland has ranked the second-worst for property affordability in the ‘As boom and bust patterns in real estate have contributed massively to the fragility of the …

Which country is the worst in the railway service? Does India also stand in the list?

Countries with the worst rail service would be those where people would people would use more of their private vehicles rather than public trains and trams. We can say metrics like reliability, rail coverage, operational time, price of tickets and overall popularity can be taken into consideration while categorizing the railway services. There are many countries like Indonesia, Brazil and others where the general public terms the railways as a nightmare. And India Does not stand anywhere in the worst list.

The problem with India is the population who use trains which is also huge. On an average 22.2 million people use the trains daily, these are the ticketed one, a lot of non-ticketed people also use the railways daily. The price of the tickets are also reasonable and are kept in check by the railways every year. The ticket price for a sleeper ticket is 0.4 Rs per km and for a 3AC ticket is 1 Rs per Km. The ticketing is done mostly online but also on counters. The IRCTC website used for booking tickets handles the load exceptionally well. During peak times i.e, tatkal booking it has over 2 million hits per second. The trains are also very reliable except in very small stations, most of the trains run on time, even the local city trains also run on time. As of 2017 Indian railways has 1,21,407 Km of track covering 67,368 Km of total route which is the fourth largest in the world(the top three are USA, China and Russia; they are not only larger than India in terms of Area but are more developed than India). The IR works 24X7 all through the year and so it stands good in this figure whereas trains in many developed countries like Ireland trains work only from 5AM to 11.30 PM. Overall Indian Railways is very popular among the public and they tend to use it more and more.

Having traveled and using the rail services I fell that Indian Railways does a damn good job. Given proper infrastructure I have no doubt that Indian Railways can become one of the best in the world.