There are many ways to travel b/w Lucknow and Varanasi. Overnight trains like LJN-CPR, BE-BSB and Kashi Vishwanath are much preferred. For daytime trains, Shuttle Express, morning ICE is preferred. One train that is often looked out is the afternoon ICE both due to it's timings and greater time taken on paper.

It doesn't have a long rake though by the time our train started from LKO, almost all seats were occupied. I came ~30 mins earlier and was able to get a window seat though.The loco link was WAP-1. The...
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train easily took 30+ mins to go out from Lucknow City limits itself. The 12 km stretch from LKO to UTR is so slow. At UTR, our train slowed, and someone from the station tried to board the running train atleast twice. He failed in both attempts. After UTR, it was mps action and we reached Rae bareily in barely an hour, 5 mins before time. Some more crowd awaited us there.

If you have to board from an intervening station on this train, better to book in C1, otherwise getting a seat could be tough.The small rake creates a problem.RBL was my destination. At RBL, I saw the unique sight of folks, young and children alike crossing underneath the train. God knows why the FOB is built. Since atleast couple of trains were canceled, the station didn't have much crowd. The station doesn't have much stuff either. Honestly, I couldn't even find a proper bottle of cold drink there :p.