You book a ticket on the Indian Railway Internet Reservation System

After trying for about 10 hours on the Indian Railways Internet reservation system at:
http://www.irctc.co.in/
and being faced by errors such as:
- Prs Error : no server available to handle specified key value
- Payment connection failed
- Java language error
- You Were Trying To Use icici Payment Gateway And The Transaction CouldNot Proceed Due To Transaction Failed in ICICI PG(URL Based)
- Unable to retrieve due to communication failure.
- java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.irctc.action.booking.QuickBookAction.perform(QuickBookAction.java:588)

I thought it might help someone else trying to do this - because evetually I think I have it figured out!!
1. Important: Make sure that your Residential and Office addresses (BOTH) match the credit card billing address - including telephone. If not it will fail the authorization during payment. It does not say this anywhere on the site!
2. Do not use Quickbook with Citibank Gateway - it will fail with the Java exception - atleast on Safari 3.0 Mac OS X 10.4
3. If you get the dreaded communication failure error repeatedly, logout completely out of the site and then try again!
4. ICICI payment gateway did not work for me and it also pops-up multiple windows which can be confusing. AXIS gateway also does not work with CC's from USA.
5. Use the Citibank Gateway. Do not choose the Citibank Credit Card payment even if the CC was issued by Citibank elsewhere - it will not work unless the CC was issued in India. Citibank ATM/Debit cards do not work either.
6. Move though each page during booking as quickly as possible using Auto-fill where possible -timeouts will cause the dreaded "communication failure" message.
7. IMPORTANT: You NEED access to a printer - to print the slip confirming the reservation or else a Rs50 charge will be levied! Or you can pay the Rs 50 since Internet cafe's may charge that much in certain parts of India for a printout!

8. Patience - and a lot of it needs to stored in advance.

Finally I did get my ticket from Trivandrum to Ernakulam - now I need to find a printer somewhere!!

Hope this helps someone.
AM