Track your trains

India gets GPS based train tracking on Google Maps

RailYatri.in, a technology startup focused on train travellers, launched the country’s first GPS train tracking platform, ‘RailRadar GPS’, to track and display the real-time movement of nation-wide trains on Google Maps.

The software enables users to track running trains along with its on-time and delay status. It uses location generated by a passenger’s smartphone, analyses the pattern of locations transmitted by the travellers to determine train location, similar to how Google Maps determines the road trafic when travelling in a car or bus.

The system has been designed to scale up to track every train in the country on a 24x7 basis, though for now the company has published around 100+ trains in the pilot phase. This is the first time deployment of a crowd-sourced location tracking is being implemented in India.

Previous attempts by the government to install GPS on trains as part of the ‘SIMRAN’ project failed due to the high project costs. Real time train tracking continued to be a challenge despite crores spent on the pilot project, which was scrapped after being launched on about 40 premium trains.