Mumbai: For the first time in the city’s history, the Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS), Shushil Chandra, shut a line in the middle of the day, on Friday. The CRS shut down the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSTM)-Andheri section of the Harbour line for more than an hour after slamming the Western Railway (WR) and the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC) for not fixing the issues that had caused the derailment of four coaches at Mahim on August 25.
The line was shut between 1.10 pm and 2.22 pm and announcements were made about the services being suspended but no information was given about when they would resume.
The suspension of services was the tip of the iceberg. It all started when WR sought a safety certificate on Thursday evening.
Claiming that the WR’s letter was incomplete and did not have all the technical parameters between King’s Circle and Mahim, the CRS stated that the section was unfit for safe train operations, suspending services at 10 am on Friday. The CRS’s letter to WR reads, “The movement of all types of traffic in all directions is hereby suspended on Point-115/116 and Point-163 of the Mahim Yard as they violate the Indian Railway Schedule of Dimension (IRSOD), as certified by officers of BCT Division of your Railway. The CRS sanction given vide above reference (a) in this regard, is hereby withdrawn with immediate effect (sic).”
Officials then asked for leeway and that the suspension be carried out in the afternoon, which is lean in terms of commuter footfall. Hence the services were suspended in the afternoon after the WR assured that it would not run any trains on the problematic crossover.
The last time that a serious safety threat had almost lead to a halt in services was back in 1993 when the slums next to the stations on the Harbour line had touched the edge of the sleepers (the blocks on which tracks are laid). But, even then the Central Railway (CR) did not shut down services, fearing public backlash.
Commuters like Violette Parker, a student and Bandra resident, were stuck at Wadala thanks to the suspension. She said she was under the impression that services would resume soon as the Railways did not announce the reason behind the disruption. “But when I called some friends they said that they had been stuck for half an hour.”
The WR made an add hoc inspection of the derailment spot once again and requested the CRS to allow the trains to run, to which he agreed and the services resumed at 2.22 pm.
An official said, “Since the CRS declared it unsafe, we had no other choice but to shut down the sections because without his safety stamp we just cannot run the trains.” He added, “It was when the general manager A.K. Gupta called him that the CRS let the trains run, but the damage had already been done.”
WR’s senior public relations officer Gajanan Mahatpurkar said, “Around 18 services were canceled due to the emergency block.”
