3 Rly staff sabotaged Guj tracks for promotions

Surat: Panics read among people around the Kim railway station in Gujarat’s Surat when it was found that several critical components had been removed from railway tracks, followed immediately by relief that the sabotage had been caught just before a train was supposed to pass over the affected rail lines, according to NDTV report

Coming in the wake of detonators and a gas cylinder being found on tracks in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, central agencies like the National Investigation Agency (NIA) got involved and the trackman who had discovered the sabotage became a local hero.

Just three days on, it has emerged that the trackman and two other railway employees had carried out the sabotage themselves, risking several lives to get social media fame, promotions and a reward, and to ensure the continuance of night duty for trackmen, which gets them off the next day. The night duty was supposed to be discontinued after the monsoon season and the revelation of the ‘sabotage’, the men had calculated, would keep it going.

Around 5.25 am on Saturday, trackman Subhash Podar informed railway authorities that he had noticed several locks had been opened and two fishplates - which connect two railway tracks - had been taken off and kept on the adjacent railway lines between the Kim and Kosamba railway stations. Podar said he was on patrol when he noticed three men near the tracks and they ran away as soon as he shouted.

Two trains, including the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani, had passed over the tracks just before the sabotage was discovered and another train was supposed to cross the same section soon after, but was stopped at the Kosamba station. Podar was joined by fellow trackman Manishkumar Surdev Mistry, contract worker Shubham Jaiswal and others and they repaired the tracks, allowing the resumption of operations. Police and NIA officials said several holes in Podar’s story became apparent as soon as they began investigating the ‘sabotage’.

The loco pilots of the two other trains, they said, had reported nothing amiss even though they had gone over the tracks minutes before the ‘sabotage’ came to light. The 12952 Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani Express had crossed at a speed of 130 kmph between 4.53 and 4.58 am - about 25 minutes before Podar raised an alarm - and the 14808 Dadar JU Express had passed between 4.38 and 4.44 am at a speed of 110 kmph.

Officials said anybody working on the tracks continuously for two hours - the minimum time required to remove the locks - would have been noticed. So, Podar, Mistry and Jaiswal started working under the cover of darkness around 3 am and started removing the locks over a distance of 1 km, hiding whenever a train would go by.