It was a normal, breezy evening when Chaudhary Jagat Singh, a man in his early seventies, was doing what he loves most — sitting on the front porch of his house and watching trains pass by at extremely slow speeds barely ten meters away from his house.
On Saturday, too, this resident of Jagat Colony was not expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen. But then, to his horror, stones suddenly began flying around everywhere. And then he saw a train hurtling towards him at an extremely high speed, its coaches jumping off the tracks and apparently hanging thirty feet high in the air. Before he could run inside, a coach rammed into his house, demolishing its walls.
“It just banged on this side of the house, pinning me down,” said Jagat Singh.
The septuagenarian was yet to come out of the shock of being a witness to an accident that killed over 24 people and injured over 200.
“It was unbelievable because just about half an hour before the accident, we had seen two trains passing by at a very slow speed because of the repair work. This train came and it did not slow down as we thought it would. In fact, before we realised what was happening, it just rammed into my house,” he said. He said that immediately after the accident, smoky haze lasted for over ten minutes.
Pintu Chaudhary, Mr. Jagat's son, said,“We had to find our way in the dark, guided by the cries of the people who had fallen out from the S2 coach that had crashed inside my house. There was this old man and a woman with her small daughter, all injured and screaming in pain,” he recalled. He added that he would file a case against the Railways, demanding compensation for the destruction of his house.