Rail travellers who were waiting for the Hubballi-Secunderabad Express at Kalaburagi Railway Station on Sunday morning missed the train as the station authorities forgot to make an announcement about it’s arrival and departure as well as its platform information.
As per the information provided by the railway authorities and some of the passengers, the train in question, which started from Hubballi the previous night, was scheduled to reach Kalaburagi at 5.57 a.m. and depart the station at 6.00 a.m. The railway authorities notified the passengers through an LED screen display about the delay of the train by 32 minutes. The passengers were waiting on the corridor at Platform No. 1 and the train arrived in on some other platform and left for Secunderabad after stopping for a few minutes. The passengers waiting for the train did not know when the train arrived and left the station as there were no announcements about it. They came to know the departure only after the announcement for the next train – Hussain Sagar Express – on the same route was made.
A few passengers met the railway station authorities and took them to task condemning their negligence. In their argument with the authorities, they even mentioned how the negligence on the part of railway authorities led to a horrible train accident at Balasore in Ordisha recently.
“We had reserved tickets for the Hubballi-Secunderabad Express which we missed because of the negligence of railway authorities. After a heated argument with the station authorities, they made arrangements to send the passengers to the next train with the same tickets. Even 15 minutes after our train left Kalaburagi station, the LED screens were showing the delay of our train by one hour,” Rehaman Patel, an artist from Kalaburagi, told The Hindu.
