Ahead of Eid in 2022, Bangladesh Railway tickets sold out online while long queues remained at stations in Dhaka. For travellers trying to secure a seat home, web sales and ticket windows were not separate systems. Demand that could not obtain a ticket on a screen flowed back into a physical line. The Daily Star captured the connection in its headline: tickets were sold out online, yet queues persisted at stations.
Eid travel compresses demand into a narrow set of departure dates and preferred trains. When the online allocation disappears, passengers who cannot abandon the journey still turn to station counters. Digitisation adds a channel for buying tickets, but it does not add seats. The result was a two-stage contest for the same scarce journey: an electronic first-come process followed by a physical one for those left outside it. The queue survived the move online because the underlying bottleneck was railway capacity, not simply the location of the ticket office.