Passengers thrash engine driver for averting accident

To slam or not to slam -- that was the question which the Sarnath Express engine driver faced on a lonely stretch of tracks in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh.

He struggled with it for a split of a second and chose... To slam the brakes, hard.. The tracks immediately before him, he had found to his horror, were under repair!

If our hero's action was instantaneous, so was the passengers's reaction. They rewarded him for saving a calamity -- by thrashing him blue and black!

The passengers' anger, surface investigations reveal, was spurred by last month's accident (wherein four bogies of the Ahmedabad-Howrah express tipped into a river killing 120 passengers) when a driver applied emergency brakes.

After his fans finished with him, the engine driver limped to the Durg and Raipur railway police stations and lodged a complaint. An inquiry has now been ordered into the incident, with the Bhilai assistant railway manager heading it.

UNI