Reading the Time Table
- Arr / Dep — scheduled arrival and departure. The originating station has no arrival; the destination has no departure.
- Halt — how many minutes the train actually stands there.
- Day — which day of the run, counting departure from the origin as day 1. A train leaving Mumbai on Tuesday evening and showing day 2 at Delhi arrives on Wednesday.
- KM — distance covered from the originating station.
What the Halt Length Tells You
Stand time is the most useful column on the table once you know how to read it, because it says something about the station that the timetable never states outright.
- One to two minutes. A minor halt. The train barely settles — be at the door with your luggage before it arrives, and know which end of the platform your coach stops at.
- Five minutes. Enough to board unhurried. Not enough to leave the platform.
- Ten minutes or more. Usually a crew change, a locomotive change, watering or a technical halt at a major junction. This is where people risk stepping off for tea — and where the train sometimes leaves without them, because a scheduled ten can become four if it is running late.
- Twenty minutes or more. Often a reversal, where the engine moves to the other end. If your train reverses, the end of the platform your coach stops at changes for the rest of the journey — coach position flags that.
A useful habit: never judge a stop by its scheduled length alone when the train is late. Recovery time is taken out of long halts first.
Halts and Track Points
A route contains far more points than stations you can use. A long-distance run like the Mumbai–Delhi Rajdhani passes more than two hundred track points and stops at fewer than ten of them. By default this shows only the halts — the places you can actually board or alight. The toggle reveals every point, which is useful for following a train's exact path, or for settling an argument about whether a train passes through a particular town, but not for planning a journey.
The Day Number Trap
Running days shown here are the days the train departs its originating station, not the days it reaches yours. On a journey spanning two or three days, a train that leaves its origin on Monday may only reach an intermediate station on Tuesday or Wednesday.
So if you are boarding mid-route, add the day number from the table to the departure day before assuming the train runs on your date. A train listed as running Monday and Thursday, showing day 2 at your station, is actually at your station on Tuesday and Friday. This is the single most common reason people turn up at a station on the wrong day.
Distance, Duration and Average Speed
The summary shows total distance, total journey time and the resulting average speed. That average includes every halt, so it always reads lower than the speed the train actually runs at — a train averaging ninety kilometres an hour over a full run is moving considerably faster than that between stations.
The figure is still useful for comparison: between two trains on the same route, the one with the higher average is the one with fewer halts or a better path, and it is usually the one to book.
Scheduled, Not Live
This is the published timetable. It does not know that today's train is running two hours late, and it does not reflect a diversion or a short-termination decided this morning. Indian Railways revises the timetable periodically, and individual trains are re-timed between revisions, so treat a printed or memorised timing as suspect if it is more than a season old.
For where the train is right now, use live train status. For what is actually leaving a station in the next few hours, the station live board. To find every train between two stations, trains between stations, and to price the journey, the fare calculator.
Timings are sourced from Indian Railways enquiry systems through a third-party provider and are indicative. ChartVacancy.in is not affiliated with IRCTC or Indian Railways.