Railway ticket reservation counters from Calcutta to Hyderabad, Mughalsarai in Uttar Pradesh and Assam’s Tinsukia had stopped working for several hours since Monday night after the fire at Eastern Railway’s New Koilaghat Building forced officials to cut power supply to the servers inside the building.

Railways officials said around 700 passenger reservation counters or points used by passengers to reserve seats were stalled because of the fire in the 14-storied building.

Unreserved ticketing systems, including local trains, were also affected, alleged many passengers.

Railway officials said most passenger reservation counters started functioning by Tuesday noon but those in the Sealdah division were stalled till the evening.

The servers in the New Koilaghat building are used by six zonal railways for their online as well as offline ticket reservations.

They are Eastern Railway, South Eastern Railway, Northeast Frontier Railway, South Central Railway, East Central Railway and East Coast Railway.

Eastern Railway officials said the fire broke out in the telecom department construction office on the 13th floor and later spread across the floor and to the floor below. Though the servers are located on the second floor, the power supply to the building was cut on the advice of the fire brigade.

Initially both online booking — done through the website of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) — and offline booking done at the reservation counters in stations and other places were affected. While the railways managed to restart the online booking through the IRCTC website early on Tuesday, the reservation counters in some stations did not work for long.

“We have our data recovery server or back-up server in Secunderabad. We managed to begin the online booking through that server. Many reservation counters had also opened by Tuesday morning,” said a senior railways official.

But in Calcutta, the passenger reservation counters in Sealdah started working only from 6.40 pm on Tuesday. The reservation counters in Howrah station did not work in the morning and came to life only around noon.

“We managed to start the reservation counters at Howrah station around noon. and the counters in Sealdah in the evening. We have also written to the fire brigade to allow us restore power supply to the reservation servers,” said Kamal Deo Das, the spokesperson of Eastern Railway. The New Koilaghat building belongs to the Eastern Railway.

Long queues outside ticket counters of railway stations on the suburban railway network in Sealdah and Howrah divisions were seen on Tuesday.

“I had to wait for over 45 minutes at the ticket counter at Sodepur station in the morning,” said Satyajit Roy, a resident of HB Town in Sodepur. “I realised it won’t be possible to make it on time for an appointment that was fixed with one of my clients. I decided to postpone it for another day and returned home.”

At several stations including Khardah, Agarpara and Belgharia, passengers either missed their schedules for the day or boarded trains later than usual. Eastern Railway officials, however, said unreserved ticketing system was not affected.

The shutdown of the counters left many passengers of long-distance trains in trouble.

Kishan Goyal, a resident of Siliguri who had come to Calcutta for work, needed two tickets to return to north Bengal. Goyal looked worried as he stood outside the reservation counter in Sealdah on Tuesday afternoon.

“I need two tickets on Tuesday. I tried to book the Tatkal tickets online but failed. At the Sealdah station, no one could tell me when the reservation tickets will be sold again,” he said.

Later Goyal called up his brother in Kalimpong who managed to buy him two tickets online for a night train to New Jalpaiguri.

Das said that the counters in Howrah and Sealdah could not work from morning since the cables connecting stations ran though the New Koilaghat building and it took time to route them through a remote location.

The inconvenience would have been more if all trains were running. What helped was that the number of long-distance trains running is still about 75 or 80 per cent of all trains. The reduced service is because of the Covid-19 pandemic.