Hundreds of ticket seekers thronged Kamalapur Railway Station on Friday morning to collect advance train tickets for Eid-ul-Azha for a smooth journey to their village homes.
Bangladesh Railway started selling advance train tickets for July 5 physically at six places in Dhaka on Friday.
Tickets are also available on Rail Sheba mobile app and the e-ticketing platform of the railway.
Though the authorities were scheduled to start selling tickets at 8am, several hundred people started queuing up in front of the railway station counters in the early morning.
Several passengers complained that they did not get any train tickets as they were sold off before noon. Some said they had to wait in the queue for over 15 hours.
Many people standing in the queue at Kamalapur complained about difficulties in accessing to railway’s website to purchase online tickets, which they said forced them to stay in the queue for hours.
Alongside men, a huge number of female ticket seekers were also seen queueing up for tickets from early in the morning. This year, the authorities have dedicated two counters for female ticket seekers at the station.
Officials said they were selling half the tickets in person and the other half was online.
Railway’s online ticket selling partner Sohoz.com officials told Dhaka Tribune that they had sold 1,978 tickets through the mobile app and another 12,296 were sold through their website on Friday.
The company also said that the website had received around 60 million hits during operation on the first day of the ticket sale.
Earlier in April, home-goers suffered immensely while collecting tickets online for their Eid-ul-Fitr journeys as the server designated for the website selling tickets was incapable to take the pressure of a large number of hits.
This year, ticket sales at the railway stations will continue till 4pm daily.
The advance tickets for July 6, 7, 8 and 9 will be available on July 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively.
On the other hand, the sale of return tickets will begin on July 7. The return tickets for July 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 will be available on July 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, respectively.
Each passenger is eligible to buy a maximum of four tickets.
The advance tickets will be sold till 4pm daily at Kamalapur, Kamalapur suburban platform, Airport Railway Station, Tejgaon Railway Station, Cantonment, Fulbaria (Old Railway Station) — and six places in Joydevpur.