Indian Railways is one of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world. Indian Railways transport 18 million passengers daily and more than 2 million tonnes of freight dialy. If you don't know, Indian Railways is also world's largest commercial/utility employer (more than 12 million employees).
I always wonder why Indian Railway Maps are not digitized. Every time you search for Indian Railway Maps, you end up with mapsofindia.com. That is frustrating. When Google launched its Map APIs, I was so desperate to create Indian Trains Google Mashup but the job that pays my bill always comes in my way. Guess what? I finally found a website which shows all the Indian trains on the Google Map with their train routes plotted on Google Map.
The website is called IndiaRailInfo.com. The site may not have the best design in the world but hey.. if you look at the features of that site, you will be amazed.
IndiaRailInfo.com lets you search for "From" and "To" station and gives you available trains for your destination. I know lot of sites do that but IndiaRailInfo also gives you an option to look at the train route on Google Map. If you select the train, it gives you the list of stations with arrival and departure timings on each station.
If you select your origin and destination, it gives you the result with detail breakdown of list of all trains, direct trains, evening trains, morning trains etc. If the train is currently running, you can see the current position of the train on Google Map. You can also check the status of your PNR, check out popular trains, City Railway Stations on the map, arrivals, departures and so much. I was really impressed by the efforts they have put in to develop the site.
The site is also available in Hindi so if you don't know english, you can get all this information in Hindi. Note to the owner of IndiaRailInfo..I really liked the idea of displaying your website in Hindi but your Google Maps are still in English. If you don't know about this feature, {ln:Developers Now Can Show Google Maps in Hindi}. Check out this article and give your Hindi Speaking visitors a chance to surf the Google Map in Hindi.
Best of all, the site is an ad-free, non-commercial website. Check out {ln:nw:http://www.indiarailinfo.com 'IndiaRailInfo.com}