Passengers can now dial 139 for rail information from any part of the country.

Under the proposal announced by Railway Minister Lalu Prasad during his budget speech, the train enquiry call centres will be functional in all the four regions of the country between June and September this year.

"By dialing the telephone number 139, passengers will be able to obtain information about arrival and departure of trains, seat availability etc, at local call rates from any part of the country," Lalu said in his budget speech.

The minister said all the call centres will have international-level facilities such as SMS alert.

He said future call centres will provide several services like railway ticketing, taxi booking and hotel booking.

Lalu said under the existing Passenger Railway Services system, reservation charts are taken out a few hours before the departure of trains.

He said it is now proposed to provide hand-held computer terminals to Ticket Travelling Examiners in reserved coaches.

The TTE will feed in the current vacancy position coach-wise and berth-wise in these hand-held terminals.

These computer terminals will be directly linked to the PRS system to transmit the berth reservation position from running trains to the PRS system, he said.

As a pilot project, the hand-held terminals will be made available in three Shatabdi trains and another train.

Railway Budget 2007-08: Complete Coverage