“Bahut shor tha. Kaise tho bhi, maine biwi-bacchon ko neeche uthara, lekin mere utharne se pehle doosra train unhe maar diya,” said Manoj Kumar Singh, holding his tears as he narrated the ghastly train mishap in which he lost his wife and his two daughters at Gotlam in Vizianagaram Saturday night.
An attempt to save themselves due to a false fire alarm in their compartment proved fatal for eight passengers of the Allappuzha-Dhanbad Bokaro Express when the Rayagada-Vijayawada passenger train coming in the opposite direction mowed them down at Gotlam station in Vizianagaram district.
Manoj Kumar, who works as an A/C mechanic in Bangalore, was going to his hometown Aurangabad in Bihar along with his wife Shweta Singh (33) and daughters Samhita (10) and Shourya (2) on a holiday. Reliving the nightmare, Manoj said he had pushed wife Shweta and daughters Shourya and Samhita out of the compartment as people jostled to get down the train after the fire scare spread. “I couldn’t do anything but watch them come under a running train,” a dazed Manoj said.
It was equally traumatic for Thakur, who helped his wife Tara Devi (34) to disembark the train. “I was trying to save her,” is all that he murmurs repeatedly to the police who tried to inquire from him about the incident. The couple were travelling from Alleppy to Ranchi. Eyewitnesses said as it was pitch dark and the ground was steep on one side, many people got down on the tracks side. “The place was full of severed body parts and bodies. It was impossible to locate them until the officials deployed flood lights,” said Nani, a B.Pharma student of St Ann’s College at Bobbili, who was travelling in the Rayagada-Vijayawada passenger, going home for Diwali.
P Adiraju (64) of Seetha-nagaram in Vizianagaram district was among the victims. Immediately after the news broke out on news channels, the family members of Adiraju rushed to the government hospital at Vizianagaram. Though they ran from one place to another, no official could tell them about his whereabouts. After about three hours of search, his sons could identify a mashed up body as that of their father’s.
“He used to visit Vizianagaram once in a fortnight for medical treatment. Hence, he acquired a railway pass as well. Though we asked him to wait one more day so that one of our brothers could accompany him, he refused saying he would return by Sunday afternoon,” said P Nani, younger son of Adiraju.
Officials could not gather much information about Alexis Tapno (27) from Kerala, Kartik Sahu (70) of Balangir in Odisha and Lokender Kumar (28) from Hyderabad.
While Kartik was travelling from Tirpur in Tamil Nadu to Balangir, Lokender Kumar is a defense employee going to Bihar from Hyderabad. Efforts are on to trace their families and inform them. Sources said some of the victims were travelling in the reserved compartments without reservation.