250 killed as trains collide head-on near Siliguri

Coming just a few weeks after the blast at the New Jalpaiguri railway station, the accident sparked rumours that it was another act of sabotage. But Railway Minister Nitish Kumar, who flew in from New Delhi andreached the site around 3 pm, as well as senior railway and police officials, ruled out a blast or any other act of subversion.

It was clearly a case of accident caused by a signalling fault, as the two trains came on the same track and collided head-on. "Someone somewhere was at fault and only a detailed inquiry will establish that," Kumar told reporters on the spot.

The Railway Board has ordered a statutory inquiry which will be conducted by Dr M Mani, Chief Commissioner Railway (Safety).

Both trains were moving at a high speed as neither was to stop at Gaisal. For the Brahmaputra Mail, the next stop was Kishanganj while for the Assam-Avadh Express it was Aluabari Road.

"We were sleeping and suddenly, around 1.50 am, there was a deafening sound. People were screaming all around," said GNS Madhukar, assistant teacher at the Hindi High School at Rangiya in Assam, who had boarded the Assam-Avadh Express at his hometown Muzaffarpur in Bihar on way to Rangiya. Madhukar escaped with minor injuries and wasbeing treated at the sub-divisional hospital at Islampur town in West Bengal, 12 km from the accident site.

"No, we didn’t hear any explosion before the accident," said Hiralal, a jawan of the 18 Mahar Regiment of the Army based at Binguri, who was travelling to Delhi on the Brahmaputra Mail.

"I was awake after having a cup of tea at Kishanganj when the train shook violently, throwing me off my upper berth," said Rameswar Prasad of Bihar, who was on his way to Duliajan in Upper Assam to visit a relative. Prasad, who received head injuries, is undergoing treatment at New Jalpaiguri.

He said he had to step over several people who were either dead or had become unconscious on the floor of the compartment before he could come out of the coach, only to fall unconscious.

S Chettry, a cook in the pantry car of the Assam-Avadh Express, said he had gone to sleep around 1 pm when he and others were thrown off their berths. "I heard an explosion and then the coach rose, as if it was an aircraft taking off, andthen came down with a thud. I could come out as the door luckily did not get jammed. I saw a huge fire and heard people screaming all around me," Chettry said.

The site of the accident looked ghastly. While the two engines lay smashed and charred, six bogies of the Assam-Avadh Express and seven of the Brahmaputra Mail lay in a mangled heap. On both sides of the tracks lay about 60 bodies, badly battered and only half-covered with white clothes.

The injured have been admitted to hospitals at Islampur and Kishangunj and to the North Bengal Medical College Hospital in Siliguri.

Even after 15 hours of the accident, no one seemed to know how many more remained trapped inside the bogies that were piled up high on top of one another. Even as the Railway Minister was surveying the scene of devastation, a body was cooped out of the mangled remains of a coach.

An angry crowd complained to the Minister that till late afternoon not even a crane had been provided to lift the bogies or gas-cutters to cut open thetwisted coaches. Railway employees were trying to remove a part of the wreckage with the help of ropes and bamboo poles.

A gas cutter has been rushed to the spot from New Jalpaiguri but it cannot reach those trapped inside the three coaches. Railway officials at New Jalpaiguri and Guwahati said heavy-duty cranes will have to be brought from Calcutta to pull down the three bogies.

West Bengal Minister of State for Civil Defence Srikumar Mukherji was supervising the rescue operations while the N F Railway General Manager, Rajendra Nath, and other top officials from the headquarters reached the spot around 2 pm.

BSF jawans from the Panjipara base and the residents of nearby villages were playing a crucial role in the rescue operations.

Harendra Garg, a final year student of the MGM Medical College at Kishangunj, who had arrived at the spot with a number of other medical students, was furious that railway officials were very late in arriving at the scene. "We were among the first people to come, alongwith some men from the BSF unit at Panjipara."

Railway officials said the Panjipara station could be the point where the signalling fault occurred. "The clue is to be sought either at Gaisal or at Panjipara, the two nearest stations in the opposite directions," said a senior railway official. But the station master, signal man and point man at Gaisal were said to have run away after the incident to escape mob fury.

According to the Railway Minister, the Brahmaputra Mail was on the right track; it was the Assam-Avadh Express which switched tracks and got in its way.