Award-winning track man run over by train

A track maintainer who had won awards for averting possible accidents and his colleague were run over by train on Varadapura-Bisanatam stretch near Bangarpet in the early hours of Thursday.

The deceased have been identified as Hari Singh Meena, a track maintainer from Jodhpur, and Ramaswamy, a patrolman from Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh.

They were performing cold weather track patrolling on the section of Bengaluru – Chennai route when they were run over by a train around 2.20 am, the South Western Railway said in a release.

Ramakrishna, also a railway patrolman, noticed the incident and alerted the assistant station master of Varadapura at about 3 am.

Senior railway officials rushed to the site and an ambulance was arranged. A doctor of railway department who reached the site declared both Meena and Ramaswamy dead.

The bodies were shifted to government hospital in Bangarpet for post-mortem.

Railways takes up patrolling of the track in the midnight when the temperature falls to detect if there is any rail/weld failure and thereby to prevent accidents. Meena had detected two such failures in the recent past in his service and was awarded by Railways.