AGARTALA: It was 8.50am on a wet Monday morning. Kamal Chowdhury was sitting in the lower berth of S9 coach of the ill-fated Sealdah-bound
Kanchenjunga Express
sipping his morning tea when the train suddenly lurched forward with great force. The impact was so powerful that his 11-year-old nephew Rajat, who was still asleep, was thrown off the upper berth into his lap.
“The train came to an abrupt halt, with
passengers
thrown about here and there.
In a matter of seconds, the quiet
compartment
was filled with
screams
of panic-stricken and
injured
passengers,” Chowdhury, a senior journalist from Tripura, recounted on the phone. He was travelling to Bengal’s Nadia district along with six of his family members to attend a wedding.
“From the window, I could see a horde of people rushing towards the train. I got down to find out what had happened,” he said. The scene that unfolded before him was of chaos and confusion, as two carriages of another train had mounted the rear of Kanchenjunga Express.
Only a few passengers were awake at the time of the accident. “Everyone in our coach was injured. Fortunately, there were no fatalities in our coach,” he said.