Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

RailRoute is operated by Dhruv Shah, India (contact by email at hello@railroute.in). For anything in this policy, write to hello@railroute.in.

2. What we collect

Search inputs

The stations, travel date, quota and class you enter, and the searches those inputs generate. This is what the Service needs in order to answer your question.

Account information, if you create an account

Searching does not require an account. Creating one lets your recent searches follow you between devices, and is the only reason we hold any of the following.

• If you sign up with an email address and password: your email address, the name you choose to give (optional), and your password. The password is stored only as a bcrypt hash — a one-way transformation. We never store, log or display the password itself, and we cannot recover it or tell you what it is.
• If you sign in with Google: your email address, your name and your profile picture, as supplied by Google. We ask Google for nothing else — no Gmail, no contacts, no Drive — and no password is involved or stored.
• Your saved searches: the stations, date and quota of your recent searches, held on our servers and linked to your account. Only the inputs are stored. Timetable and availability results are not kept against your account.

Technical information

Standard request information such as IP address, browser type, device type, referring page, and timestamps, together with error and performance logs. This is used to keep the Service running, to debug it, and to protect it from abuse.

Aggregate usage information

Anonymous or aggregated measurements of which pages and features are used, collected through a third-party web analytics provider. These measurements are not used to build a profile of you as an individual.

Searches and what they returned

Whether or not you have an account, we record each search you run — the two stations, the date and the quota — together with what we showed you for it: how many trains came back, what their seat availability said, and whether we found a way to book a confirmed ticket. The purpose is to check the thing this site claims to do. Without it we cannot tell a search that produced a useful answer from one that produced a screen of nonsense.

These records carry no name, no email address, no IP address and no device fingerprint. They are grouped by a random identifier that is created in your browser and deleted the moment you close the tab, so the searches of one sitting can be read together and cannot be connected to you, to another visit, or to another device. If you are signed in, the record notes that a signed-in person made the search and links it to your account so that deleting your account also removes that link. These records are deleted after 90 days.

Session recordings

We use PostHog to record some visits as a replay of what appeared on screen: the pages you opened, clicks, scrolls, and the layout as it was shown. The purpose is to see where the product is confusing — for example a search that led nowhere, or a filter that hid every result — so we can fix it. It is not used to advertise to you, and it is not sold.

Anything you type into a form (stations, dates, email, password) is masked in the recording and is not stored as text. A visitor who never signs in is not given a PostHog person profile. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, we do not start a recording. You can also write to hello@railroute.in and ask us to delete a recording that involves you.

What we never collect

• No account is required to search. You can use the whole Service without signing up.
• No payment data, ever. RailRoute takes no payments, so no card number, UPI ID, bank detail or billing address is ever entered into or stored by the Service. Payment happens on IRCTC, on their systems, under their privacy policy.
• No PNR, passenger name, age, gender, ID number or any other passenger detail is requested by RailRoute.

3. Cookies and browser storage

Signing in sets a session cookie so the Service knows a request is yours. It carries an identifier for your account and nothing more — no search history, no profile — and it is cleared when you sign out. Signing in also sets short-lived cookies that exist purely to make the sign-in itself safe: a cross-site-request-forgery token, and, while a Google sign-in is in progress, the values needed to verify the redirect back from Google.

PostHog, which provides analytics and session recordings, also sets cookies or similar storage in your browser so it can tell one visit from another. That happens whether or not you have an account. Hosting providers may set cookies for security and load balancing.

4. Why we use it

• To run the search you asked for and show you the results.
• To sign you in, and to show you your own recent searches if you have an account.
• To keep the Service available, secure and free from abuse.
• To diagnose faults and improve accuracy and speed.
• To understand, in aggregate, which features people use.
• To watch session recordings of how people use the site, so we can fix confusion.
• To check whether searches actually end in a bookable ticket, by reading back the answers we gave.

5. Who we share it with

We share information only with service providers who help us operate RailRoute — hosting and infrastructure providers, analytics and session-recording providers (currently PostHog), and third-party providers of railway timetable and availability information — and only to the extent they need it to perform that role. They are required to protect the information and may not use it for their own purposes.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect our rights or the safety of users.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for third-party advertising.

6. How long we keep it

Your account and its saved searches are kept until you delete them. Deleting your account removes the account record, the Google link if you made one, and every saved search attached to it, immediately and permanently. Accounts that are never used again are deleted after 24 months of account inactivity of inactivity.

Server and error logs are retained only for as long as they are useful for operating and securing the Service, and are then deleted or anonymised. Aggregate analytics are retained in a form that does not identify you. Session recordings are stored by PostHog on their servers and deleted when they expire under our PostHog retention settings.

The records of searches and their results described in section 2 are deleted 90 days after the search was run. They carry no identifier that outlives the browser tab, so there is nothing in them to connect to you after that tab is closed — the deletion is housekeeping, not the thing that makes them anonymous.

7. Security

Traffic to and from railroute.in is encrypted in transit. Access to systems is limited to those who need it, and external data access happens server side. Passwords are never stored in a readable form: only a bcrypt hash is kept, so nobody — including us — can recover your password. Saved searches are readable only by the account they belong to. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security; if a breach affecting personal data occurs, we will act promptly and notify affected users and authorities where the law requires it.

8. Your rights, and deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, without asking us. Open the account menu (your name or picture, at the top of the page) and choose Delete account. This permanently removes your account record, your email address and name, your Google link if you have one, and all of your saved searches. It cannot be undone, and there is nothing left for us to restore afterwards. You can also remove any single saved search from the recent-searches list without deleting your account.

Subject to applicable law, including India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you may also ask us for access to the personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, or object to certain processing. Write to hello@railroute.in and we will respond within the period the law allows. If you use RailRoute without an account, we may hold nothing that identifies you as a named person, in which case we will say so. A session recording of an unsigned-in visit can still exist on PostHog until it expires; write to us with a date, time and enough detail for us to find it if you want it deleted.

9. Children

RailRoute is intended for general use in planning travel and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

10. Changes to this policy

We will update this page when our practices change, and the date at the top will change with it. Material changes will be highlighted on the site.