Bhubaneswar: Indian Railways has started running passenger trains on the tracks at Bahanaga village in Odisha’s Balasore, where two trains– Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express and Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express– derailed and left 275 dead and over 1,000 people injured.
Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw waved at the crew of a goods train and prayed for a safe journey, as services resumed on the affected route after 51 hours of a train accident, last night. A goods train carrying coal destined for Rourkela Steel Plant from Vizag port, departed at approximately 10:40 pm.
Vaishnaw tweeted about downline restoration: “Down-line restoration complete. First train movement in section.”
The upline was also restored within a span of just two hours. “Three trains, consisting of two down trains and one up train, have already departed from the section. We plan to run approximately seven more trains tonight,” he stated.
Visibly disturbed by the accident, the Minister said that responsibility was not yet over and vowed to go beyond the immediate aftermath of the incident, focusing on reuniting missing persons with their anxious family members at the earlier.
#WATCH | Balasore,Odisha:…”Our goal is to make sure missing persons’ family members can find them as soon as possible…our responsibility is not over yet”: Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw gets emotional as he speaks about the #OdishaTrainAccident pic.twitter.com/bKNnLmdTlC
— ANI (@ANI) June 4, 2023
18449 Puri-Patna Baidyanathdham Express and 18022 Khurda- Kharagpur Express have, however, been cancelled due to unavailability of rake.
Meanwhile, Odisha is providing free bus services to the people who want to travel to Kolkata in view of the disruption of rail services due to Bahanaga train mishap. A total of 20 buses from Puri, 23 buses from Bhubaneswar and 16 buses from Cuttack left for Kolkata as of 11.30 pm on June 4.
On Sunday, the Railway Board recommended for handing over the train accident to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The announcement came hours after the minister told state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan that the “root cause” of the accident and the people responsible for it have been identified.
Malfunctioning of electronic interlocking system, a sophisticated signal system responsible for preventing train collisions by managing their movement on the tracks, was identified as the cause of this devastating incident.
