Cancellation & refunds
Drop in your IRCTC e-ticket or paste the booking SMS. You get one card: what you get back if you cancel now and at each cut-off, when the chart is prepared, your TDR deadlines, and reminders for your calendar. It is all read on your device.
Drop your IRCTC e-ticket PDF here
or
The ERS PDF from your IRCTC email or app. Also takes a saved SMS as a .txt file.
Read on this device. Your ticket is never uploaded — not to Railmonk, not to anyone.
Open the ticket
Drop the ERS PDF from your IRCTC email or app, choose it with the button, or paste the booking SMS.
Check what was read
The card shows the train, route, class, quota and each passenger’s status. Fill in anything marked as not found — an SMS never says whether it is Tatkal.
Read the refund
See what comes back if you cancel now, and the time at which that amount next drops.
Note the chart and TDR times
The chart time is when to check your final status; the TDR windows are what to do if the railway lets you down.
Add reminders or save it
Download one calendar file for the journey, the chart and the next refund cut-off, or save the journey on this device.
An IRCTC ticket carries three clocks that are never shown together: the refund, which steps down at 72, 24 and 8 hours before departure (30 minutes for RAC and waitlist); the reservation chart, which settles your berth; and the TDR windows that matter only if something goes wrong. The reader works all three out from the ticket itself, with the same engines as the cancellation calculator, the chart time calculator and the TDR checker, so the numbers agree everywhere on the site.
A ticket has your name, age and PNR on it, so it stays with you. The PDF is opened by pdf.js in your browser, the SMS by the same page, and when Railmonk is installed, a ticket shared from WhatsApp, Gmail, Files or Messages is caught by the app on your phone before it could reach the network. If you save the journey, it is kept in this browser without the passenger names.
Your live PNR status. The statuses on the card are the ones printed when the ticket was issued, and Railmonk has no licensed feed of current ones — so rather than guess, the card tells you when the chart is due and leaves the latest status to IRCTC and NTES. For the same reason the refund is what the published rules give: the amount on IRCTC’s own cancel screen is final.
No. The PDF is opened by pdf.js inside your browser and the SMS is read by the same page; neither is sent to Railmonk or anyone else. When you share a ticket into the installed app, the share is answered by Railmonk’s service worker on your phone, not by a server. After one visit the reader works without signal too.
No. There is no clean, official way for a site like this to read live PNR status, so Railmonk does not try. The statuses on the card are the ones printed on your ticket at the time it was issued. For the latest, check PNR status on IRCTC or NTES — the chart time on the card tells you when it is worth checking.
With the same engine as the cancellation calculator, under the refund rules in force since 1 April 2026. A confirmed ticket pays a flat charge per passenger until 72 hours before departure, 25% of the fare until 24 hours, 50% until 8 hours, and gets nothing back after that. RAC and waitlisted passengers pay only clerkage until 30 minutes before departure. A confirmed Tatkal ticket gets no refund at all. The card shows the amount now and at every cut-off still ahead.
The booking SMS does not say whether the ticket is Tatkal, and a confirmed Tatkal ticket is refunded nothing while a general one gets most of its fare back. Guessing would make the refund figure wrong in the worst possible way, so the reader asks. A Tatkal waitlist number (TQWL) is the one thing in an SMS that proves the quota, and it is used when present.
The first chart is prepared 10 hours before departure, or by 8 PM the evening before for trains leaving between 5 AM and 2 PM. The final chart is about 30 minutes before departure. Both count from the train’s departure at its originating station — if you board mid-route, enter that departure on the card for exact times.
Install Railmonk from this page (Chrome or Edge on Android shows an Install button). It then appears in your phone’s share menu: open the e-ticket PDF or the IRCTC SMS, tap Share, choose Railmonk, and the ticket opens here. iPhone does not let web apps receive shares, so there you pick the PDF or paste the SMS on this page.
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Last reviewed
20 October 2026
Content update
Auto-updated on Jun 28, 2026
Scope: The reader applies the refund slabs effective 1 April 2026, the December 2025 chart preparation timings and the published TDR filing limits, through the same engines as Railmonk's individual calculators. Statuses are as printed on the ticket; no live data is used.