Most of the advance tickets for journey by the new Cox’s Bazar Express train on the Dhaka- Cox’s Bazar route via Chattogram from December 1 were sold within a few hours on Thursday.

The Bangladesh Railway started to sell 4,680 advance tickets since 8:00am on Thursday for passengers to travel between December 1 and December 3.

The tickets were available both online and at four counters – Kamalapur and airport stations in Dhaka and Chattogram and Cox’s Bazar stations in the port city.

This direct intercity train on the Dhaka-Cox’s Bazar route will take passengers from only these four stations and it will take eight hours and 10 minutes to cross the entire route.

The train has a total of 780 seats including – non-AC Shovon chair seats which each will cost Tk 695 and AC chair seats which each will cost Tk 1,325.

Out of the total seats, 114 seats are being reserved for taking passengers from Chattogram station in each train.

Bangladesh Railway’s Dhaka division commercial officer Shah Alam Kiron Shishir told New Age on Thursday afternoon that most of the 2,340 tickets for three days on the Dhaka-Cox’s Bazar route had been sold by 10:00am.

A few tickets on Chattogram- Cox’s Bazar route remained unsold in the afternoon, he said.

At the same time, he said, around 50 per cent of the tickets on Cox’s Bazar-Dhaka route remained unsold.

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina on November 11 inaugurated the much-hyped 102-kilometre new single-dual-gauge rail link on the Dohazari-Cox’s Bazar section for bringing the country’s major tourist destination under the rail network and connecting Bangladesh with the Trans Asian railway corridor.