“I was sleeping on the upper berth when I felt a sudden jolt. The next thing we knew is that the coaches started rolling and women in the lower berth got displaced,” recalls a survivor of the train collision in Andhra Pradesh’s Vizianagaram district, which took place on Sunday, October 29. The said passenger, who was travelling from Kothavalasa in Vizianagaram district, added that some of them managed to reach the door and exit the topsy-turvy train.
The train tragedy in Vizianagaram, eerily similar to the Odisha train accident of June 2023, took the lives of 14 people and injured 54 others when two passenger trains – Visakhapatnam-Palasa and Visakhapatnam-Rayagada – collided with each other. TNM spoke to several passengers who recounted the initial shock before the culmination of the tragedy.
Speaking to TNM, Santosh, the nephew of one of the deceased named Lakshmi, discussed the extent of damage caused by the accident to his family. “My aunt died and the postmortem is still ongoing. Her sister Suryakantam and her mother suffered injuries to their left limbs. They had just left our home district of Srikakulam to travel for a wedding when the accident took place. No one saw this coming,” he said.
Another survivor of the accident said that one male person was stuck in between two seats in the Visakhapatnam-Palasa train and despite their best efforts, they were unable to rescue him on Sunday.
Santosh, the cousin of a passenger named Ravi who died in the collision, said that the accident shocked his village of Godikommu in the Jami mandal of Vizianagaram district. “Ravi is survived by two daughters aged 12 and eight. He was employed in contract work and told us that he had to go to Vizag to assist with street light maintenance,” he added. Santosh also mentioned that another resident of his village, a woman in her early twenties named Kumari, has been admitted to the Government General Hospital in Vizianagaram, and is reportedly critical.
While it is unclear what triggered the collision, safety officials have seized the signalling records and collected statements from the surviving crew members to probe whether the tragedy was caused by a problem with the signalling system or due to human error.
In the tragic accident, five coaches – three of the Palasa train and two of the Rayagada train – derailed, killing the loco pilot of the Rayagada train and 13 other passengers. Waltair Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) Saurabh Prasad confirmed that the section had three lines, and both passenger trains were on the middle line.
Two National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) and three State Disaster Relief Force (SDRF) teams carried out relief operations. So far, 29 of the injured people have been discharged from the hospitals. The remaining 25 have been admitted to hospitals in Vizianagaram, Visakhapatnam, Alamanda, and Kothavalasa.