Sri Lanka Train Ticket Price, SLR 1st, 2nd & 3rd Class and Reserved Fares

Sri Lanka Railways (SLR) publishes a Passenger Ticket Rates table for every station on the network: one row per destination, giving the rail distance in kilometres and the fare in 1st, 2nd and 3rd class. Read across twelve of those tables, Colombo Fort, Kandy, Galle, Jaffna, Trincomalee, Kantale, Batticaloa, Valaichchenai, Avissawella, Matara, Kankesanturai and Badulla, 4,071 rows in all, and the fare turns out to depend on one thing only: how far you travel. Sort every row by distance and the three fare columns never once step backwards. That is the function this page reproduces.

1. Find the journey distance. The calculator stores the SLR network as a tree rooted at Colombo Fort, with each station's official rail distance from Fort as printed in the SLR distance chart. For two stations on the same branch, the distance is the difference of those values; for stations on different branches the path backtracks to the junction (Polgahawela, Ragama, Maho, Gal Oya, Peradeniya, Maradana) and forward again. Checked against all twelve tables, 704 of 705 station pairs came back within 0.02 km of SLR's own figure, and the 589th within 0.01 km.
2. Read the published fare for that distance. The 93 rows below the surface of this tool are the distinct (1st, 2nd, 3rd) fare triples SLR's tables show, each with the lowest and highest distance at which that triple actually appears. A 120.74 km journey, Colombo Fort to Kandy, lands in the row SLR prints from 113.14 km to 121.67 km: Rs 950, Rs 500, Rs 240.
3. Say so when the boundary is unknown. SLR does not publish where one fare row ends and the next begins, only the fares. Consecutive rows therefore leave a gap of about half a kilometre. A journey that lands inside a gap is priced at the higher row and marked as such on the result, instead of quietly picking a side.
4. Multiply by passengers and double for a return trip. SLR does not discount return tickets.

The second fare system: reserved seats, Intercity, Night Mail and the Ella Odyssey

SLR runs two price lists, and the distance table above is only the first. The second is a set of notices, one per line, each headed “Revision of charges for seat reservation with effect of 01.08.2022” and listed in SLR's index under Seat Reservation Ticket Fare. These do not work by distance at all. Each is a triangular matrix over a handful of zone points on that line, and a journey is priced by the zones its two ends fall in. The Main Line notice has five (Fort, Kandy, Nanuoya, Ella, Badulla); the Northern Line has five for its reserved tables and a sixth, Madawachchiya, for its non-reserved ones. Between them the 13 tables encoded here cover a reserved seat on a normal train, a reserved and a non-reserved Intercity seat, the Night Mail on four routes including its Rs 4,950 sleeping berth, the dedicated Colombo Fort to Kandy service, and the Ella Odyssey.

Two rules keep that honest. First, nothing is derived: the matrices are transcribed cell by cell, and where SLR prints no cell the page says so rather than interpolating. Colombo Fort to Veyangoda, 37.48 km on a line whose first zone point past Fort is Kandy, returns the ordinary fare and the sentence that no reserved price is published, not the Kandy figure. Second, the zone is always named. Jaffna is not a zone point; it sits between Kilinochchi and Kankesanturai, so SLR prices it in the Kankesanturai zone, and the page tells you that instead of quietly substituting one station for another.

What SLR does not say is whether a printed reservation figure is the whole ticket or an amount added to the ordinary fare. Three things in the notices point at the former. The Northern and Batticaloa notices publish tables headed “non seat reservation in the Intercity Trains” in the same format and the same file as the reserved ones, and a price for a seat that is not reserved cannot be a reservation fee. The Main Line notice prints “3rd class normal Rs 600” under a reservation heading. And read as whole tickets the figures form a clean ladder above the ordinary fare on every line, where read as add-ons the non-reserved rows mean nothing. So the page shows each figure as the published price for that seat, beside the ordinary fare and never added to it, and says plainly that SLR has not spelled this out, so the counter or the reservation portal settles the final amount.

Three things are still deliberately not priced here, because SLR publishes no figure for them anywhere online: child, student, season and concessionary tickets; the five Rail Car fare tables, which are full per-station matrices in a different shape; and any service fee the online reservation portal adds. The booking counter issues the first, and the other two wait for their own pass.

As a standing check, the tool replays SLR's commercial notice of unreserved 2nd and 3rd class fares from Colombo Fort , a separate publication from the station tables, through the full distance-and-fare path. All nine of its station fares come back identical. If that ever stops being true, the data here is stale and needs re-reconciling.

• Sri Lanka Railways: official site (fare schedule, timetable, station list)
• Sri Lanka Railways: List of Ticket Fare and Charges (index of the per-station Passenger Ticket Rates tables)
• Sri Lanka Railways: commercial notice: unreserved 2nd and 3rd class fares from Colombo Fort
• Sri Lanka Railways: seat reservation ticket fares, all six lines in one notice (effective 1 August 2022)
• Sri Lanka Railways: Main Line seat reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Coastal Line seat reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Northern Line seat reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Batticaloa Line seat reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Trincomalee Line Night Mail reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Talaimannar Line Night Mail reservation fares
• Sri Lanka Railways: Ella Odyssey special train fares
• Mobitel mTicket: official SLR online ticketing

Every fare here was transcribed from the Sri Lanka Railways published Passenger Ticket Rates (List of Ticket Fare and Charges) and re-verified on 2026-09-22. SLR may publish a newer revision at any time, the chart at the booking counter is always the authoritative legal fare. The encoded data covers 93 published fare rows out to 596.51 km and 65 stations across the Main, Coastal, Hill Country, Puttalam, Kelani Valley, Northern, Eastern, and Trincomalee lines.

The reserved-seat, Intercity, Night Mail and Ella Odyssey figures are a separate dataset: 13 zone matrices transcribed from SLR's consolidated English notice and cross-checked cell by cell against the per-line copies linked above, both fetched and re-read on 2026-10-17. Every one carries SLR's effective date of 1 August 2022. Where the two SLR copies disagree on a row label, the page prices only the pairs one of them actually prints and leaves the rest blank.