Indian Railways Will Spend Rs 18,000 Cr On Solar Energy; IRCTC Website Won’t Work On These OS Now

Constantly advancing in technology, and now ecology is concerned is the Indian Railways!

They have always been in the news for starting some new and awesome initiative, be it a pizza vending machine, or a tie-up with ISRO to for users to track their trains’ arrival and departure easily.

Their newest initiative is to build solar power units along railway tracks, and Indian Railways has invested Rs. 18000 crores in this eco-friendly idea. The reason behind this is to reduce the usage of electricity by railways and solar power tenders of 4 gigawatts will be employed.

Railways to Utilise Solar Power

As of today, railways utilize around 16 billion units of electricity per year, which is equal to supplies from 12 GW of generation capacity. Indian Railways spends around Rs. 10,000 crores on the utilization of electricity, which is approximately Rs. 6/unit.

The 4 GW will be built in two sections, of 2 GW each. The first one will be implemented in Odisha, Punjab, West Bengal, Haryana, and Rajasthan while the remaining capacity would be set up in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana.

This will be done simultaneously alongside the new efforts of electrification of railway tracks. As seen in April 2018, 30,212 route kilometers, or nearly 45% of the total rail lines, have already been commissioned on electric traction. Electrification of tracks will bring about a huge reduction in the diesel and oil usage by railways.

Read more about it here.

IRCTC Website Will Not Support Windows XP?

Who has the time to go to a railway booking window and reserve tickets well in advance? Everyone today opts for the online booking or e-ticketing facility. But now, there’s twist!

Now, Indian Railways will not allow customers to book tickets on its next-generation e-ticketing website using a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 machines.

According to a notification that the website shows, the website is being migrated to TLS 1.2, which does not support the older versions of Windows. The migration is being done for better functioning of the website and for improved security features.

You will be able to book tickets on the next generation IRCTC website only if you are using any of the following OS (operating software):

1. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
2. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
3. Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
4. Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
5. Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016

We will keep you updated, as more details come in.