BHOPAL: An alert Railways employee on Sunday prevented a train accident by timely red-flagging a massive rain cut (soil erosion) under the tracks at the Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan border witnessing heavy rainfall.
At around 6:11 a.m. Rajendra Kumar, working with the civil engineering and track maintenance section, spotted the rain cut under the tracks between Hetampur and Dholpur railway stations on the Delhi-Chennai route, North Central Railway (Jhansi Division) official spokesperson Manoj Singh told this newspaper.
Delhi-bound (12627) Bengaluru City-Hazrat Nizamuddin Karnataka Express, which was just a few hundred meters away from the site at that time, was red-flagged and immediately stopped by the authorities who were informed by Kumar.
A rake was immediately pressed into service to repair the site and it took over four hours and forty minutes to normalise the traffic. “While one short-distance train connecting Agra and Jhansi was short-terminated at Gwalior, three to four other trains were diverted,” the spokesperson said. In August 2015, more than 30 lives were killed in a twin rain mishap due to heavy rainfall.