Train Accident in Mukerian, Hoshiarpur District, Punjab
Thirty-seven people were killed and around fifty injured when the Ahmedabad-bound Jammu Tawi Express collided head-on with the Jalandhar Pathankot DMU passenger train. The accident occurred at 11.50 a.m. on Tuesday, the 14 Dec, near Harse Mansar village, about 25 km from Pathankot. The locomotives of both trains were destroyed in the crash and at least four bogies were completely mangled.

Villagers rushed to the site soon after the crash and started pulling the injured from the wreckage. Soldiers from the Army base in Pathankot were called out to help in the rescue efforts and cranes were at the crash scene near Mansar village to pull apart the trains.

The collision took place after the express train and the local DMU train came on the same track. The local train was coming from Jalandhar. Railway sources said a failure in the signalling system apparently led both the trains to come on the same track on the single line. With only a single track between the two stations,Bangara and Chak Kalan, the two trains moving in opposite directions were bound to collide. "Even if the station masters had realised their mistakes there was no way they could halt the two trains once permission to go was given due to the absence of an effective wireless or mobile communication system between the station masters and two engine drivers," a retired signal expert said.

The stations masters need not have permitted the trains to leave if they were not able to use the established communication system. "However what exactly happened, only an inquiry by the commissioner safety can tell with certainty," the official said.

The Railways announced an ex gratia payment of Rs 1 lakh each to the next of kin of the dead, Rs 15,000 to those grievously injured and Rs 5,000 to those with simple injuries. The railway commissioner (safety) has ordered an inquiry into the accident.

Describing the collision between the two passenger trains which killed 37 people in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district on Tuesday as a 'brutal murder', Railway Minister Lalu Prasad said the two station masters will be booked on the charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder for allowing the trains on the same track.

"It is not an accident but a brutal murder and the two station masters of Bangara and Chak Kalan and an engineer who allowed the Jalandhar Pathankot DMU passenger and the Jammu Tawi Ahmedabad Express to move on the same track will be booked under 304 A (culpable homicide) of IPC," he told reporters at the site of the accident here.