The Railway Board on Friday decided to suspend running of some important passenger trains on the two sections of Kharagpur-Rourkela and Kharagpur-Adra during night hours in the wake of the derailment of the Jnaneswari Express earlier on Friday.
‘Cascading impact'
This comes into immediate effect and officials admitted that it will have a cascading impact on the running of trains in general over the next few days till the decision is in operation.
The Board worked all through the day as the exercise required rescheduling of train timings. The consequence of this is that the railways have cancelled five pairs of trains arriving or departing from Howrah on Saturday, rescheduled 12 trains including those which were scheduled to leave on Friday night and diversion of four others.
The decision affects train movements in West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra as the running of the specified trains will remain suspended between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. The targeted trains scheduled to leave in the evenings will now commence their journey only after 5 a.m. from Howrah.
Similarly the return journeys too have been rescheduled by upto eight hours so that they reach Jharsuguda not before 4:30 a.m.
The operation of these specified trains stand changed in some cases till June 1 keeping in view of the “black week” being observed by the CPI (Maoist) in the five states of West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
Member Traffic, Railway Board, Vivek Sahai told reporters that intelligence inputs spoke about threat to railway properties and the railways were worried about the safety of the passengers.
Second time
This is the second time that the Railways have embarked on this crucial strategy to safeguard the lives of the passengers. Through a similar decision, all passenger trains had been suspended between May 17 and May 20 in the Central India Coalfield and Badnera sections in the wake of the 48 hour bandh called by the CPI (Maoist).
There were 32 naxalite attacks on the railways in 2010 of which bomb attacks accounted for 21 incidents.
