150 minutes late, Coromandel Express crawls by its Black Friday past

ON BOARD COROMANDEL EXPRESS: A hush descends on the B4 coach of the Chennai-bound Coromandel Express as the train slows down a few kilometres after crossing Balasore on Wednesday. It's a signal: the train is approaching the disaster zone, the spot where, last Friday, a triple pile-up had left 288 passengers dead.
That fateful evening, the train had rammed into a static goods train at over 100kmph. Five days later, there's a tautness in the air as the first Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express after the horrific accident begins to crawl at 20kmph as it approaches the spot.
When it finally rolls past Bahanaga Bazar station at 9.30pm, two-and-a-half hours behind schedule, passengers peer out of the compartment into the nearly deserted platform, which had been milling with rescuers until a couple of days ago.
Many passengers leave their seats and huddle near the windows, some even pausing their dinner. A couple of elderly passengers fold their hands and mutter a quick prayer, even as others whip out phones to click photographs and make videos. The doors are crowded as people jostle for a vantage spot, but most are disappointed: not much is visible in the darkness.
Once the train crosses the stretch and picks up speed, there's a palpable sign of relief. But everyone is silently contemplative; it takes a while for the first murmurs of conversation to be heard.
‘Cautious’ Coromandel takes 6 hrs to cover 3.5hr journey to Bahanaga
There was no dearth of conversation a few hours ago as the train pulled out of Shalimar station at 3.25pm, six minutes behind schedule. Everyone settled down in their seats to make acquaintances with strangers-turned journey mates, and the topic of conversation was invariably Friday’s accident. Several passengers even asked pantry staff when the train would cross “The Spot”. “Will we be able to see it from the window?” a passenger had wondered.
Other question were more direct, if somewhat also more morbid: “Are the crushed and mangled coaches still there?” “Are relatives still searching for bodies?” Someone had a question. And someone had an answer. “The tracks have been cleared”. “The bodies are now in morgues.” Even children were keen not to miss the scene as the train crossed The Spot. “Please wake me up if I fall asleep,” a girl told her mother.
The anticipation that had built up for what was to be a 3.5 hour journey to Bahanaga Bazar turned out to be an excruciatingly slow six-hour one as the train stopped every time another train approached from the opposite direction. “I think the loco pilot is being cautious due to the sheer scale of the disaster,” as a passenger put it.