Railway wagon takes four years to reach destination

Infamous for delays and poor passenger facilities, the Indian railways faced another embarrassment, when a goods train wagon took a little less than four years to cover 1400 kilometres to reach its destination.

The wagon containing fertilisers, that had left Visakhapatnam on November 2014 for Basti railway station in Uttar Pradesh, about 200 kilometres from here, reached its destination on Thursday.

Manoj Kumar Gupta, the owner of the firm, which had booked the fertilisers, said that the consignment should ideally have taken a month to reach Basti. ''It normally does not take more than a month,'' he said.

''We contacted the railway authorities when the consignment did not reach here even two months after booking but they failed to trace the wagon,'' Gupta told Deccan Herald from Basti.

He said that his company wrote dozens of letters to the railway officials though without any success. ''We stopped sending letters after some time...we felt that the wagon might have gone missing,'' he went on to add.

Both Gupta and the local railway officials were surprised when the wagon attached to a goods train arrived at Basti railway station. Gupta said that he had taken delivery of the fertilisers.

''It is up to the company that had shipped the fertilisers to make claim, if any, from the railways,'' Gupta said.

Local railway officials said that the wagon might have been detached from the goods train in between for some reasons resulting to the delay.