In a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the recent Odisha accident, 13 people lost their lives when two trains that had left Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam at almost the same time collided on Sunday, October 29. Nearly all the victims, which included four Railway employees, are local residents from north Andhra, hailing from villages close to the accident site between Alamanda and Kantakapalle in Vizianagaram district. How exactly did the collision happen?
The two trains involved in the accident are the Visakhapatnam-Palasa (no. 08532) and Visakhapatnam-Rayagada (no. 08504) passenger trains. The train to Palasa was scheduled to leave Visakhapatnam Junction station at 5.45 pm and the Odisha-bound Rayagada train was scheduled to leave just 15 minutes later, at 6 pm. Both were covering rather short routes and were expected to reach their destinations around 10 pm. According to Waltair Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) Saurabh Prasad, the section had three lines, and both passenger trains were on the middle line.
Around 6.45 pm, less than 40 km from Visakhapatnam, the Palasa-bound train crossed the Alamanda station and was coming to a halt just before the Kantakapalle station, waiting for a signal to go ahead. On the same track, the Rayagada-bound train was trailing a short distance behind. At this time, the Rayagada train also received a stop signal, according to Biswajit Sahu, Chief Public Relation Officer (CPRO), East Coast Railway. However, the Rayagada train overshot this signal and went ahead, and ended up colliding with the rear end of the Palasa train, he said.
Five coaches – three of the Palasa train and two of the Rayagada train – derailed as a result. With the loco pilot of the Rayagada train killed in the accident, Railway Safety officials have now seized the signalling records and collected statements from the surviving crew members to probe whether the accident was caused by a problem with the signalling system or due to human error.
The accident happened along the Vizianagaram-Kothavalasa section of the Waltair Division of East Coast Railway, on the Howrah-Chennai Main Line. The Odisha triple train collision in June this year, in which over 290 people died, also happened along the same line. The Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express had wrongly switched tracks due to a signalling error and collided with a goods train. Some of its coaches derailed and fell onto an adjacent track, and a third train — the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express — then collided with these derailed coaches.
The preliminary report by the Railways said that the Coromandel Express was given a signal to enter a lane (the “up lane”), and the signal was revoked later, but the train took a nearby lane (the “loop lane”) and ran into a stationary goods train. A month later, a subsequent report by the Commissioner of Rail Safety (CRS) found lapses in the Signalling and Telecom (S&T) Department of the Railways.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) which has been investigating the incident filed a chargesheet recently against the three accused Railways employees — senior section engineer in-charge (signal) Arun Kumar Mahanta, senior section engineer (signal) Amir Khan, and technician Pappu Kumar Yadav — under Sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender) of the Indian Penal Code, and Section 153 of the Railways Act (endangering safety of persons travelling by railway by wilful act of omission).
The Union government had announced an indigenous automatic train protection (ATP) system called Kavach, but as of March 2023 it had been deployed only on 1,455 km of railway tracks in the country (barely 2%).