The railways authorities have extended the timings at all its counters for long distance trains bookings to 10 pm. Now the timings will be from 8 am to 10 pm. Informs a booking official, “Seeing the rush from April 1, as the booking period has now been extended to 120 days we have decided to extend timings to 10 pm.” Passenger reservation system centres across the city witnessed a heavy rush following extension of the advance reservation period from 60 days to 120 days from Wednesday.

The move also had an impact on IRCTC's online reservation booking system as many were unable to book tickets due to an overload. CR booking officials at CST had to skip lunch, besides putting in extra hours, and they have decided to forego their weekly-offs till April 4.

A CR official said, "We had to open 10 additional windows to cater to the rush. The crowd was more than double, compared to other days." CR said it handled 23,000 forms, as against the daily average of 8,500-11,000. The earnings too shot up to Rs 6 crore, from an average of Rs 2.5 crore. A senior official said, "On an average 71,000 tickets are booked per day in the western zone, which includes WR, CR and Konkan Railway. However, by 2 pm, almost 1.40 lakh tickets were booked through various centres." On WR, earnings shot up dramatically from Rs 1.47 crore on March 31 to Rs 4.53 crore by 3 pm on April 1.