Passengers scheduled to travel on Chennai Mail on Thursday had a harrowing experience after reaching Krantiveera Sangolli Rayanna (Bengaluru city) station at 9.30 p.m. only to find out that the departure of the train had been put off to 5 a.m. on Friday.
This was only the beginning of a long night for them as some passengers claimed that they were pushed around and threatened by the Railway Police when they tried to draw the attention of officials to their plight and request them to accommodate some passengers on an alternative train.
The departure time of Chennai Mail has been changing regularly for the past few weeks as the pairing train which comes from New Delhi has been arriving late because of fog. “The train scheduled to arrive at 1.50 p.m. sometimes reaches eight to nine hours late. We need at least six to eight hours for maintenance before it can run again as Chennai Mail. As a result, we had to delay the departure time,” a senior Railways official said.
However, what irked the passengers was that there was no information to them about the delay. “Many of us reached the platform at 9.30 p.m. and saw the train parked there. Around 10 p.m, they ran a ticker saying that the train timings had changed. None of the officials we approached had any answer. Several passengers were travelling urgently and had bought tickets as late as 8.30 p.m. If they knew in the afternoon that the train was delayed, why did they issue tickets without informing,” said Vidya R., an entrepreneur from Chennai who frequently visits the city.
The passengers, as a desperate measure, went and stood in front of Kaveri Express which was scheduled to depart at 11.45 p.m. “We asked them to accommodate people who had to travel urgently on Kaveri Express, but they refused. The policemen even pushed a few passengers around. There were people who were trying to bring political overtones to the argument as well,” Ms. Vidya said. Some other passengers said their phones were seized by the police and the videos and pictures of the incident were deleted.
Railway officials denied that their was any assault. “The passengers kept saying that they wanted to travel by Kaveri Express which was not possible because that train had reserved passengers. The passengers were warned that stopping a train is against the law and action could be taken against them if they persisted. There were heated arguments, but no physical assault. They then went to the waiting rooms and left by Chennai Mail in the morning,” said Bengaluru Divisional Railway Manager Sanjiv Agarwal.
