3,000 People, 51 Hours: How Railways War Room Handled Odisha Train Tragedy

New Delhi: 

A collision between two goods train in Berlin and Hannover in November last year saw the tracks being restored after 24 days, while it took five weeks for a track to get restored in Cyprus after a head-on collision.

In India, given the dependence on trains, delay was not an option, which is why among the most important actions that Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw insisted upon, hours after the triple train tragedy in Odisha’s Balasore, was the restoration of railway tracks. But this was only one of the tasks the team had to do under pressure.Nearly 3,000 people monitored by the Railway Ministry’s war room worked round the clock for 51 hours to ensure the tracks were laid, bodies cleared and trains running at the Balasore triple train tragedy site that claimed 275 lives and left over a 1,100 injured, apart from bracing up to the biggest challenge that is not over yet – identification of all bodies and struggling to preserve them till they are claimed.