JOIN USOdisha train tragedy: Anxious wait for relatives of passengers at Chennai Central
Anxious relatives of people who travelled on the Coromandel Express that collided with two other trains in Odisha’s Balasore district thronged the Chennai Central railway station on Saturday to find out the status of their loved ones.
Preliminary information suggests that about 100 people with addresses in Tamil Nadu have boarded the train from West Bengal and Odisha and work is on to find out how many are migrants working in Tamil Nadu and how many are originally from the state. However, no bodies of people from the state have been identified so far.
Southern Railway has set up a help desk at the railway station and ran a special train to take relatives of those who travelled on the train to Odisha to identify them. At the station were so many people frantically looking for some information on their loved ones.
A migrant worker from West Bengal said his sister and her daughter took the train from Kolkata on Friday and he has no information on their whereabouts despite best efforts. “I have been trying to reach them over the phone but in vain. I have no idea what happened to them. I think I will take the special train to Odisha and look for them at hospitals where injured are being treated,” he said.
Passengers of the Coromandel Express who escaped from the collision are expected to reach Chennai by Sunday morning as a special train departed from Odisha on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the Tamil Nadu government rushed two ministers Udhayanidhi Stalin and S S Sivasankar and three senior IAS officers to Odisha to assist the relief operations. While the ministers and a senior officer are camping at Balasore, the remaining two officers are in Bhubaneswar.
Officials said there was no information on people from Tamil Nadu losing their lives and it will take a day to identify all bodies recovered from the train collision site.
Chief Minister M K Stalin, who cancelled all government and party programmes to commemorate M Karunanidhi’s birthday on Saturday, announced a solatium of Rs 5 lakh to those who died in the accident.