Are you planning for a long journey and also want to utilize break journey feature provided by Indian Railways for us so that in the same ticket we can halt over some stations only to continue later?

Why would we want do a Break-Journey? It saves lot of money. If you were to book separate tickets then the fare will be way more than the break-journeyed tickets. Indian railways charges you for a telescopic distance in case of break journey tickets. Additionally you save yourself from booking multiple tickets and additional burden of Rs. 40-60 cancellation charges per person on separate tickets.

Break Journey Rules

Here are the actual break journey rules. The main points are that you can do a Break Journey for 2 days in any single journey for every 500 km's traveled and after you have traveled at least 500 km from the source station. Also premium trains: Rajdhani/Shatbadi/Jan shatbadi are excluded from this facility.

My Break Journey

Here I want to show you how I’ve booked break journey ticket for a journey for my family in Sept., 2011 from Vishakapatnam- Nizamuddin - Dehradun. So along with break journey it looks like Vishakapatnam- [Durg] - Nizamuddin - Dehradun. That means I want to do a break journey at Durg which is more than 600 km from source station Vishakapatnam. Also Durg falls into the train route. Please keep in mind the Nizamuddin is in New Delhi only so we'll get down at Nizamiddin station and board the train for Dehradun from New Delhi station.

Ok so you want to book it quickly as soon as possible? We can’t book it from IRCTC. We need to book it only from the reservation counter. Let me show how I booked my tickets and it’ll then be clear to you.

So my trip looks like this: Vishakapatnam- [Durg] - Nizamuddin - Dehradun:

1. Board at Vishakapatnam
2. Get down at Durg ( this is called break journey)
3. After two days catch any other or the same train from Durg to Nizamuddin
4. Get down at Nizamuddin(this is actually in New Delhi)
5. Go to New Delhi station
6. Board train at New Delhi for Dehradun
7. Reach Dehradun

A limitation seems to be that your all tickets should be in the same class. That is you may not travel in Sleeper in one hop and 2AC in another.

How I filled the Ticket Booking Form

I filled two forms. In the first, boarding station is Vishakapatnam and next journey is from Durg to Nizamuddin. See the red circled portions in the ticket for below.

In the second form I’ve just filled my journey details from Nizamuddin to Dehradun.

The rail clerk made the booking, booking a ticket, noting its reference number and using it in the next tickets. So finally I got 3 tickets whose fare was calculated at discounted rate as per Indian Railways Telescopic distance calculation and I saved lot of money.

The Final Tickets

Here are those tickets with number written by the booking clerk.

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