The Indian railways has often been called the life line of the country. Running across the length and breadth of the country, it is one of the largest rail networks in the world and transports over 6 billion passengers and over 350 million tonnes of freight. Here are seven websites that cover (almost) the entire  gamut of railway operations that you and me will ever get involved in.

1. erail.in

Erail.in is the place for quickly looking up trains between stations and whether tickets are available in or around given dates.  Erail has a no frills interface and loads quickly. You can also get route maps, running status and PNR inquiries, but the quick train and seat availability lookup remains its USP.

2. Indiarailinfo.com

Indirailinfo gives you all that erail  gives and then some more. It has a record of delays in start and arrival, links up questions and comments to the train being looked at, has news, distance traveled,  speed and even lets you correct information like platform numbers. And you can further filter your search for trains by departure or arrival days and times and classes. It also links to videos of trains!

The pages are heavy and needs some bandwidth. The design could be better, but this is the most comprehensive site yet on Indian Railways and offers everything about passenger trains other than booking. Not recommended for mobile or datacard use.

3. Trainenquiry.com

Trainenquiry gives you current running status of a selected train. (The site has a number of other useful links, but this is the key USP.) You have to go through four sequential steps of identifying a group of trains, selecting the exact train, selecting the station and finally selecting the day of journey before you can get to the information you want. Laborious process, but it works and it works from your cell phone also.

One problem with this site is that you cannot do repeated queries on the site because of caching issues. You need to reload / redo every search from start

4. irctc.co.in

You can book and cancel your railway tickets here, after registering yourself. This has grown to become what is probably the largest ecommerce site in India. The site itself is simple and easy to use, but what sets them apart is the quality of customer service. They are really good and understand what customer service is all about, Period.

5. fois.indianrail.gov.in

If your business with  the railways is about freight services, then this is the website to go to. You can track your parcel at this site. Regular customers have their own login to manage their freight.

6. Railway tenders

If you do business with the railways, chances are high that you need to track their tenders. If your want to track the tenders put out by the Indian railways, you can do that form any number of tender sites. I have linked to one of them above. Different railway units have their own tendering systems and need to be tracked separately. For example, the tenders put out by IRCTC can be found here and Delhi Metro's tenders can be found here.

7. IRFCA

IRFCA stands for the Indian Railways Fan Club . The site runs a mailing list as well as has extensive documentation on all things Indian Railways, including engines (locomotives for the initiated) crew scheduling, and a massive database of engines.. ooops locomotives - 10691 of them when I last checked-. I also has a gallery of pictures of everything Indian Railway.