No hassle at Kamalapur as advance ticket sale starts online

People used to stand in long queues for hours in Kamalapur railway station to buy advance train tickets before Eid, but this year there is no such crowd there as the online sale of 100% of the advance tickets started on Friday.

The railway ministry on Friday sold tickets for 17 April. Around 8,000 tickets were sold within a minute of starting the ticket sales at 8am through the Rail Sheba app, and almost all of the 24,725 tickets designated for the first day were sold within five minutes.

Dhaka Divisional Railway Manager Mohammad Shafiqur Rahman said, "The suffering of passengers has decreased due to selling tickets online. Now no one has to come to the station and stand in queues since midnight. Our work has also decreased a lot."

Entering the Rail Sheba app after 8:30am, our correspondent found that there were no tickets for most of the destinations including Dinajpur, Panchagarh, Thakurgaon, Rajshahi, and Lalmonirhat. Tickets for Padma Express, Silk City, Dhumketu and Banalta trains running from Dhaka to Rajshahi were also sold out within a few minutes of starting the sales.

At 10:50am, there were only five tickets left for the trains running from Dhaka to Mymensingh and Jamalpur.

A number of ticket seekers said they faced problems while buying tickets online.

Md Rubel, a railway passenger, said he was able to buy a ticket online after making several attempts.

Sandeep Debnath, chief executive officer of Bangladesh Railway's ticketing partner Shohoz-Synesis-Vinsen JV, said, "We have not received any complaints. The server ran smoothly. Initially, 1,000 tickets were sold per minute."

High demand for 19-21 April bus tickets

A number of bus transport companies, which started selling advance tickets for Eid holidays on Friday, said there was a high demand for bus tickets for 19-21 April.

Prabhat Roy, counter manager of Shyamoli Paribahan at Gabtoli, told TBS, "Most of the passengers are interested in travelling from 19 April night to 21 April afternoon."

Md Abdus Sattar, general manager of Greenline Transport, said, "We have started selling advance tickets from 1 April. The demand for tickets for 19-21 April is high, but there is not much demand for the days before or after those three days."

A number of bus transport companies, including Hanif and Eagle, did not start selling advance tickets on Friday as per an earlier announcement, as they plan to start it from today.