Today, I have to cancel a paper train ticket after a long time. We have been travelling by train but booking always online. Since this ticket was booked by family member and I need to cancel it, I have to go through the ordeal of cancelling the ticket. First, my brother tried to cancel the ticket since he went to Secunderabad railway station. Being a Sunday, counter closed by 2pm and he could not cancel it. That ensured losing 25% of the ticket since ticket has to get canceled one day before the day of travel.
Today, I went to railway reservation office near JNTU, kukatpally. I could have tried the Hi-tec city railway station reservation counter. but for surety, I went straight to JNTU counter. Also if you are not careful, you accidentally board the flyover to kukatpally anyway.
There is metro work going on out there; the reservation office does not have parking for four wheelers. It is bang opposite side of the road (wrt JNTU). I decide to take a U turn at JNTU circle and park in front of an ATM. Being a morning, I could find parking there. otherwise, need to find it in some lane. Walk to the reservation counter on the o/p side of the road. Early morning reaching there took order of 10 minutes.
You now see 4 queues there. All 4 queues will TAKE tatkal booking only from 10am-10:45am. You can see people sitting on chairs forming a separate tatkal queue. I was not looking for Tatkal booking but I need to get through the normal queue before 10am. Otherwise, I would have to wait until 10:45am. I got into one of the queues. I saw people sitting in Tatkal queue with ID proof etc. The lady handling my queue decided to count all currency which got the queue adding wait time of 5-10 minutes. Thereafter, it moved fast and I could get through it in order of 20 minutes.
The return towards hi-tec city from kukatpally during office hours has traffic and took order of 25 minutes. Traffic over the flyover also crawled at slow pace. In nutshell, booking paper ticket is strict no-no unless u like standing in queues and driving in traffic. but sometimes – you have to go thru it.