Southern Railway’s Chennai Division has been catering to the demands of short distance commuters by operating over 700 services daily.

The dedicated suburban corridor covers 90 stations in Chennai and its vicinity. There is a noteworthy increase in the number of passengers using train services during January 2018 and there is a 36% growth in the number of passengers who book tickets through UTS mobile App. Using this app, a person can book suburban tickets including season tickets using Net enabled Android/Windows phone.

The UTS on Mobile tickets was launched in January 2015. Mobile UTS paperless ticketing was launched in April 2015 over the Chennai Egmore – Tambaram Suburban section. This was later extended to the entire suburban section in June 2015. Then this facility was extended to Season Tickets also. Later, Geo-fencing (for paperless tickets) were extended upto Tirumalpur, Tiruttani, and Sulurpettah during December 2016. Paper ticket though mobile app extended to non-suburban stations (non-geo fenced area) also from December 2016.

After UTS on Mobile was introduced in 2015, during the month of May 2015, the total number of passengers using UTS on Mobile were 9732. Today, the total number of passengers using UTS on Mobile has crossed 1 Million with 10,31,029 passengers having used UTS on Mobile in January 2018.

OCR machines (optical character recognition) provided at Chennai Central, Chennai Egmore, Tambaram, Chennai Beach and Guindy stations are the latest in the Mobile Apps. These machines take print out of mobile app paper tickets by recoginising the details in customers mobile. This is an addition to already available avenues like ATVM and Railway UTS counters to take print out of mobile app tickets.