It didn't even work that well on this side of the ocean - if I recall correctly when this redesign first hit the web HN ripped dcurtis a new one.

Without addressing the Indian trains issue at all, there's a common mistake designers make that particularly annoys me - which is that "clean looking" is often conflated with "usable". As much as we hate to accept it, there is a lot of data out there that indicate many extremely busy looking, messy looking websites out there work very, very well.