Kolkata metro snag leaves passengers stranded in tunnel for hours

Commuters of Kolkata metro had the scare of their lives after being stranded inside a tunnel this morning for over an hour as a non-AC metro rake of the city's main public transport, developed a major snag.“The incident happened at 11.25 am after the south bound metro left Park Street station. It was due to some technical snag. Details are being looked into,” R N Mahapatra, spokesperson of Kolkata Metro said. After the break down the stranded passengers were evacuated from both sides of the rake by ladders.

However, it took over an hour to evacuate all the passengers. Although Metro officials claimed no one fell sick, many passengers fainted and had to be given primary medical aids after being evacuated. This led to disruption of metro services for about two hours. The railway authorities had to run truncated services from Dum Dum to Central on one side and Mahanayak Uttamkumar (Tollygunge) to Kavi Subhas (New Garia) on the other during several two hours.Incidentally, this is not the first time commuters had to experience this in Kolkata metro, which handles average daily traffic of 600,000. There has been several instances of snags in metro in recent months disrupting the services, mostly in the non-ac rakes. Today's incident was also in one of the decade old non-ac rakes.

Railways had initially propsed to replace all the non-ac rakes by early this year, which is yet to happen. As of now there are about 13 AC-rakes and 14 non-AC rakes are in operation.

While Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) avails coaches from international coach makers such as Hyundai Rotem and Bombardier; its forerunner and the country’s first underground mass transit system in Kolkata has been dependent on the Railways’ Integral Coach Factory (ICF) at Perambur (near Chennai) for rolling stock.

However, Railways last year initiated process to rope in global manufacturers for Kolkata metro rakes.

The plan, however, is yet to materialise. “The manufacturers across the globe are more accustomed to the standard gauge. But the present Kolkata metro is a broad-gauge system, unlike metro in other parts of the country, which are of standard gauge.

Hence, we had some difficulties to find out manufacturer,”an official said.