‘Loud thud... bodies lay strewn all around’

Kolkata, June 3

Returning home to their families after several months of working in South India, passengers aboard the 12864 Bengaluru-Howrah superfast express suddenly heard a loud thud, following which they fell off their berths and lights went off.

They were five hours away from their destination in Howrah when the train they were travelling got involved in a triple train accident at the Bahanaga Bazar station in Odisha’s Balasore district.

The train, which was running a little over three hours late from its schedule, was moving towards its next stop Balasore, some 20 km away, when the accident took place around 7 pm on Friday. Imtajul Khan of Murshidabad said he saw many people dying in front of him. Bodies were strewn all around, he said.

Mizan Ul Haq, a resident of Bardhaman, was in one of the coaches at the rear. “The train was running at a high speed. Around 7 pm, a loud sound was heard and everything started moving in all directions and I fell from the upper berth as the lights went off,” Haq said, adding he managed to come out of the coach.

“It was ghastly, many people with grave injuries were lying around beside mangled coaches,” Haq, who was lucky to have escaped with minor injuries, said at the Howrah station, where medical aid, food and other assistance were provided by the railway authorities to the surviving passengers.

The unaffected 17 coaches of the 12864 Bengaluru-Howrah superfast express reached Howrah at 1 pm on Saturday with 635 passengers, of whom 40 to 50 people were administered medical treatment on arrival, North Howrah Deputy Commissioner of Police Anupam Singh said.

Rekha, a Bengaluru resident coming to Kolkata, said she was in a coach ahead of the wagons that got derailed. “It was total chaos initially. We got off our compartment out of fear and sat in the nearby fields in the darkness till our train finally started for Howrah in the wee hours,” she said.