Kolkata: India’s first metro railway — Kolkata Metro — is giving its passengers horror rides as authorities have failed to repair ageing tracks and carriages.
On Wednesday afternoon, passengers travelling from the south to the northern end of the city had a harrowing time as their train rolled away with its doors open.
“It took about five minutes to rectify the error and get the doors at the rear end of the train closed. However, there was panic due to the rush of passengers. As it is, the number of commuters has gone up to over 600,000 in the last few days due to non-availability of sufficient buses on the roads,” a Metro spokesperson said.
According to an official, a fault may have set off the sensors, which indicated that the doors had closed.
“The trains are usually very crowded and people may have applied pressure on the doors. There was some panic when passengers found the doors open — their screams may have alerted the conducting motorman at the rear cab and he immediately applied the emergency brakes,” the spokesperson said.
“A few coaches had entered the tunnel by then but the one with open doors remained in the platform. The motorman reversed the train cautiously till all the coaches were in the platform. All doors were then opened and passengers got off. The open doors were then checked and set right.”
Officials said that ageing passenger carriages were proving too difficult to maintain and such incidents had become a norm for the city’s metro travellers.
“Many of our rakes [wagons] have passed their expiry dates but still we are forced to use them due to non-availability of new ones. Faults have also developed in our air-conditioned rakes giving passengers even more difficult time,” said an engineer.
“During rush hours each trains is overloaded and it has become acute since the number of buses in the city have reduced drastically. Unless new measures are taken, such things will happen,” admits another officer.
