Seventh train sabotage attempt averted in Uttar Pradesh

Time of India

03-06-2025

Lucknow: Averting yet another incident of suspected sabotage, the alert loco-pilots and the train manager of Tanakpur-Bareilly City passenger train spotted trouble on the tracks and acted swiftly to prevent a potential disaster on June 1.
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
The incident took place on the railway tracks near Dohna station in Bareilly.
It was the seventh such incident in the state this summer.
The culprits, still unidentified, had tampered with the point mechanism, a system that guides trains between tracks at junctions. They stuffed ballast—the crushed stones that stabilize railway tracks—between the tongue rail and stock rail, jamming the mechanism designed to ensure smooth train transitions.
The tongue rail, a tapered, movable rail that fits snugly against the fixed stock rail (of the main track), was left inoperable, threatening to derail the train by disrupting its path.
Adding to the sabotage, the unidentified miscreants bent the earthing plate, a flat metal component connecting the overhead equipment (OHE) to the switch expansion joint rail (SWJR). The SWJR allows rails to expand and contract with temperature changes while maintaining the switch's functionality.
Station master Bhupinder Arora of Dohna station reported the incident via a memo, prompting immediate action. The Northeastern Railway's Izzatnagar division confirmed the sabotage, and an FIR was filed at Bhojipura station under Section 150 of the Railway Act (malicious attempts to wreck trains).
Senior superintendent of police Anurag Arya said that a team has been formed to track down those responsible for this dangerous act.
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
On May 31, loco-pilots of the 64021 Delhi-Shamli MEMU train averted disaster when they spotted a 12-foot iron pipe, ballast, and a broken concrete tube placed on the tracks near Shamli station. Before that, on the intervening night May 29-30, an attempt to derail the New Delhi-Bhubaneswar Tejas Rajdhani Express (22824) was foiled after ballast was found on the tracks between Bheerpur and Meja Road in Prayagraj.
In the same month, two attempts to derail Delhi-Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express (20504) and Kathgodam Express (15044) were recorded on May 19, near Dalelnagar and Umar Tali stations of Hardoi district, when an unknown person had kept wooden log on rail track.