Mangled coaches pose tough challenge for track clearance

Building on overnight search and rescue operation, the railways on Sunday deployed high-tech cranes and scores of workers to clear the tracks even as the sleepy town of Khatauli tried to come to terms with the train tragedy.

Two heavy duty 140-tonne cranes were pressed into service at the crack of the dawn to clear derailed coaches, from which the survivors were rescued and bodies pulled out till late Saturday night.

Coaches of the high-speed Utkal Express on Saturday jumped the rails, with one of them crashing into a house adjacent to the track near Khatauli in UP leaving over 20 passengers dead.

A group of curious onlookers gathered at the site of the accident on Sunday morning, as two coaches were hauled and put off track on the ground beside it.

Linesmen and other workers brought from nearby places, shoveled away the unwanted stones as new concrete sleepers were laid to reinforce the ill-fated tracks.

“We have come from Panipat to work on the clearing of tracks,” said a linesman on the job.

Work is currently underway to haul an overturned coach, which had rammed into the facade of a local college, while another sleeper coach which had rammed into a house, shattering its frontage, is still to be restored on the ground.

“The train had 23 coaches out of which 13 had derailed.

It was running at a speed of about 100 kmph when the accident took place,” said Delhi Division District Railway Manager, R N Singh.

Six of the derailed coaches were damaged severely.

Badly mangled coaches are posing a tough challenge in carrying out the work, going on in full swing after the rescue operation by the National Disaster Response Force got over around 3 am.

A posse of security personnel from the UP Police, the Railway Police Force, the PAC, the RRF, has been deployed at the site of the accident since it occurred on Saturday evening.

And, it is not just the authorities having a sleepless night, almost the entire city seems to have lost sleep due to the sheer magnitude of the tragedy, that has befallen this town.

Image: Rescue operations underway at the accident site where coaches of the Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express train were derailed in Khatauli near Muzaffarnagar on Saturday. Photograph: PTI Photo