Hundreds of people have been standing in long queues at Kamalapur Railway Station ticket counters for half a day and ended up shouting and getting angry as they did not manage to get their intended tickets.
A young man was found selling 6 AC Cabin tickets of Chilahati-bound Nilsagar Express on Tuesday. The ticket price for AC Cabin from Dhaka to Chilahati is Tk 965. However, the young man was asking for a price of Tk 3,500 for each at Kamalapur Railway Station on Tuesday.
In this way, tickets of berths and berths booked in the name of VIPs senior officials of Ministry of Railways and Railway Department are being sold from the counter of Kamalapur Railway Station.
Those who spent sleepless nights waiting in line for tickets did not even get a decent Chair Coach ticket let alone an AC ticket.
A Tk 1,000 Bangladesh Railway AC Cabin ticket is being sold for Tk 3,500 ahead of the Eid. Samsul Haq, a ticket seeker, waited for 12 hours for a ticket but failed to collect any. All online tickets were sold out within the first five minutes on Monday, claims Sahaj.com which has been assigned to sell train tickets online.
The Bangladesh Railway started selling advance train tickets for Eid from April 23 - 50 per cent of the tickets are available online and the remaining are at the railway station ticket counters.
Many complained they could not get the ticket even after logging in the first minute. Getting no ticket online, people crowded all five railway stations in Dhaka, including Kamalapur Railway Station, but most of them did not
get the desired ticket even after standing in line for 2 to 3 days.
According to Sahaj.com, about 18 lakh users hit the website at the very first minute on Monday. Of them, the first 13,000 were supposed to buy Eid tickets.
"At least five lakh users hit our website on the first minute of the first day, 10 lakh on the first minute of the second day. All tickets were sold within the first five minutes on the first day," he added.
Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) have arrested a member of a gang, who sold train tickets in the black market, at Sreemangal upazila in Moulvibazar district along with train tickets. The arrested man, Md Shafiullah, 45, hailed from Ramganj upazila of Lakshmipur district.
Acting on a tip-off, a team of RAB-9 conducted a raid at Sreemangal Railway Station gate on Monday afternoon and arrested Shafiullah along with five train tickets, said a press release from RAB-9 on Tuesday.
Earlier, he was arrested along with advance train tickets in 2016. During initial interrogation, Shafiullah admitted to being involved with the gang of black marketers.
A case was filed against the man under the Special Power Act with Sreemangal Railway Police Station.
