It took 20 hrs to pull out 1 body

In fact, the 80-year-old’s body was the only thing rescue workers had to show at the end of an operation that dragged on throughout the night and extended into Wednesday morning.

Worn down by fatigue and handicapped by the lack of proper equipment, rescue work stumbled on. Often, rescue workers could be spotted disentangling a body from a crushed coach and then abandoning their efforts when the going got tough, moving on to another body.

As dawn broke, it was evident that Railway officials were concentrating on clearing the bridge and getting it back on track. ‘‘Our priority is to open one side of the line by Thursday afternoon,’’ said Ashwini Upadhyay, Divisional Safety Officer from Mugalsarai. He claimed that the rescue work was proceeding speedily enough. ‘‘But it is true that there are many more passengers unaccounted for, who may still be trapped inside.’’ Aurangabad District Magistrate S Siddharth also told PTI there was a remote chance of survivors inside AS-2 since ‘‘no human voice emanated from it’’.

Hajal reached the accident spot at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. In an hour’s time, he managed to locate his grandmother’s coach. And, through a huge crack on one side of the bogey, he could see her sitting on her berth, dead.

The body of Hajal’s sister-in-law, which was on another berth, was easily pulled out. But the rescue workers got stuck when it came to his grandmother. ‘‘They started taking her body out, but abandoned it because it was getting difficult,’’ Hajal told The Indian Express. ‘‘I kept begging the railway officials to do something. The DRM heard me out and deputed some people in the night.’’

Not that it helped. Hajal, his feet regularly sinking into the wed mud, had to climb into the bogey to tug at the pieces of metal around Bhagwati Devi’s body. By 3 a.m., the constant use of the cutters sparked off a fire inside the coach, which was extinguished only after an hour. Then, the rescue team ran out of fire extinguishers.

Knots of workers sat around as this farce played out. Some of them refused to help douse the fire, but did so when they were ordered to. Hajal stayed inside the coach, helping the cutter. Bhagwati Devi’s body was pulled out at 7.30 a.m.

Several railway workers had been deputed to lift the debris off the bridge and fortify the base of the pillars.

Another group landed up to fix one of the two Indian Railways cranes that had broken down. Yet another group worked with the other crane, nudging the coaches off the bridge and onto the river bank.

Between 11 p.m. and 7 p.m, two cranes were at work. The operation wasn’t butter-smooth: one of the bogeys split on one side when it hit the ground, and the body of a middle-aged victim tumbled out. The body lay there for 30 minutes before a Railways official spotted it and had it removed.

By midnight, despair had overtaken hope and duty. By this morning, 10 more bodies had been pulled out from AS-2.

But there were so many who, even until afternoon, had no information on whether their family members were dead or alive. Rajesh Kumar, a Varanasi Development Authority Officer, kept hunting for his brother, Rajesh Kumar. ‘‘I’m not even getting a confirmation of whether he was on the train at all,’’ he said.

D Shanache had arrived here by the special relief train from Howrah to look for his brother-in-law C R Haldar, sister Prabati and niece Sushmita. Until 3 p.m., he walked about, looking at the faces of all the bodies before he finally found his family members. ‘‘All the bodies were in different hospitals. And there was no ice to keep in the coffins.’’