Evening peak hour services on the Western Railway (WR) were thrown out of gear on Wednesday after an external cable fell on the overhead equipment at Mahalaxmi station. The incident occurred at 6.40 p.m. on the Down fast line, towards Virar, and led to a short circuit.
To resolve the issue, WR had to cut the power supply across all four lines on the entire section, which runs from Prabhadevi to Churchgate, leading to trains being stopped mid track. The impact was felt across the corridor as the local trains bunched one behind the other.
It took nearly 30 minutes to resolve the issue and services resumed by 7.10 p.m. There was overcrowding at nearly every station, and Lower Parel, Prabhadevi and Dadar were the worst hit.
Abhimanyu Kumar, who travels from Lower Parel to Andheri every day, said while there were announcements regarding the technical issue, there was no clarity on how long it was going to take to fix it. “Most people were waiting on the platform leading to overcrowding. The first train saw some amount of chaos, however, things settled after subsequent locals arrived,” he said.
Churchgate station had more crowd than usual and there was confusion for around 15 minutes as commuters were kept guessing about the fate of the trains that evening. However, once services resumed, commuters said that the crowd dispersed relatively quickly. “The station was crowded for about ten to fifteen minutes but it soon disappeared. The Western Line despite facing issues always runs efficiently,” Veena D’souza said.
The incident led to 24 suburban services on WR being cancelled, while 50 others were delayed.Services ran nearly 20 minutes late in the immediate aftermath of the incident and services were running on time by around 9 p.m. WR officials said they were inquiring where the cable came from as it was not a permanant fixture and seemed to have been introduced recently.