What Does REGRET Mean In Indian Railways?

While booking train tickets through the official website of Indian Railways you must have come across a certain term ‘REGRET/WL 440 (or any other number)’. Quite obvious you must have failed to understand the full meaning of the term. From your previous experience of booking train tickets you can very well understand that WL signifies waitlist and the number 440(or any other number) signifies the position of your waitlist. But however, you have failed to understand the exact meaning of the term ‘REGRET’.

Meaning of ‘REGRET’

The term ‘REGRET’ in simple English language means feeling sorrow or disappointment for certain reason. Similarly, in Indian Railways the term ‘REGRET’ is used to convey that the train ticket for the required class is no longer available. This is ways that Indian Railways shows their apology for not being able to provide the required to its valuable passenger. The term ‘REGRET’ will always be mentioned before the ticket class a is no longer available for sale to the passenger.

For our better understanding let us cite an example. Let us suppose that while doing online booking you come across the term REGRET/WL 441. This means that REGRET the ticket for the concerned class is no longer available.

Cause for unavailability

As a matter of fact, railways will only sell those WL tickets that have even a slim chance of becoming RAC or confirmed. For this the reservation officers first browse the past waitlists and then decide how many number of waitlisted tickets to be issue for selling for a particular class on a particular train. Once that number is crossed, they stop selling the tickets for that particular class.