Piece of rail track tears into running train’s coach, 1 dies

PATNA: Coming close on the heels of a Puri-bound train running engineless for 13km in Odisha a few days back, another bizarre incident involving an Express train claimed one life in neighbouring Bihar early on Saturday.
One passenger got killed and two others were injured when a 10-metre-long piece of railway track suddenly tore into a general compartment of running Hatia-Gorakhpur Maurya Express (15027). The ‘bolt from the blue’ came from below the coach and hit the passengers between Bansipur and Kiul stations in Lakhisarai district around 3.30am. The incident happened soon after the train crossed Bansipur station under the Danapur division of East Central Railway (ECR).

Sources said track renewal work was going on at the spot where the mishap happened for over a month now. The piece of track that hit the passengers was one of the many lying a few metres away from the existing line, they added.

“It seems miscreants placed this piece on the existing track in an upward position... It pierced the floor of the compartment next to the engine the moment the train hit it,” Danapur deputy railway manager (DRM) Ranjan Prakash Thakur said, while terming the incident as ‘freak’. A probe into the mishap has been ordered, he added.

Commissioner of railway safety (eastern region) PK Acharya has been tasked with probing the incident and submitting his report to the Railway Board within a week, said Danapur RPF commandant Chandra Mohan Mishra.

According to Mishra, the deceased has been identified as Mangal Seth (50) of Azamgarh in UP. The injured persons are Tridev Sahni (28) of Jata Kalisthan village in Samastipur district and Mukesh Kumar (27) of Simri Bakhtiarpur village in Saharsa district of Bihar. Both of them are undergoing treatment at the Patna Mecial College and Hospital.

Meanwhile, train services on the Up line in the Jhajha-Kiul section remained paralysed for at least five hours after the mishap.

In a related incident, the Buxar-Fatuha MEMU passenger train (63262) remained stranded at Dumroan, 100km from Patna, for nearly seven hours on Saturday morning as a clip in the overhead electric wire snapped around 5am. Traffic movement on the Down line was restored around 1pm after the glitch was fixed.