By IANS
Raipur/Nagpur : Traffic on the busy Mumbai-Howrah rail route was disrupted Tuesday after 10 wagons of a goods train derailed in Chhattisgarh, rail officials said.
The 10 rice-carrying wagons of the Guwahati-bound goods train originating from Gondia in Maharashtra derailed at 10.45 p.m. Monday between the Darekasa and Bortalab railway stations in Chhattisgarh’s Rajnandgaon district close to the Maharashtra border.
“No human casualty was reported in the accident but the bogies were scattered on the up and down lines totally disrupting the busy rail traffic on the Mumbai-Howrah route,” Ratan Basak, Raipur railway division spokesman of the South East Central Railway (SECR), told reporters here.
“Several local trains have been cancelled and long-distance trains have been diverted. Senior railway officials have rushed to the accident site and engineers and workers are doing their best to remove the debris and restore normal traffic by late night,” the spokesman added.
“All long-distance trains on the route, including the Howrah-Mumbai mail and the Azad Hind Express, were diverted to other routes while the work of lifting the wagons and repairing the tracks was on,” SECR’s public relations officer D.V.R. Rao told IANS in Nagpur.
“Investigation into the cause of the derailment will start only after the track is repaired and normal traffic restored,” Rao said, when asked if Maoist rebels were behind the accident.
Some people from nearby villages who gathered at the site of the mishap plundered rice from the upturned wagons before the police and railway staff arrived, witnesses said.