A railway carriage rammed into a house, rescue workers working for hours to pull out trapped bodies, overturned mangled coaches being hauled off with hi-tech cranes -- for 24 hours since the tragedy struck, the town of Khatauli lived through frightening visuals.
On Saturday evening, Manoj Baliyan and his family were enjoying the cool breeze when suddenly they heard a massive thud and saw a railway bogie flung in the air and heading towards their house like a giant projectile.
"We were sitting close to the main gate, and we ran for our lives inside the courtyard. The coach crashed into the front of our house, shattering its facade. If the bogie had entered all the way inside or crashed over from the rooftop, we all would have been buried," he said.
But, this was just the beginning of the nightmare for the 42-year-old man, as injured passengers were being flung out of the doors and emergency windows by the impact of the derailment that has claimed 22 lives and left 156 injured, 26 of whom are in a critical condition.
"Blooded bodies of passengers, some of them badly mutilated were, lying in front of my house. It was frightening and our children started crying seeing such a terrible sight. It will take a lot of time for the town to feel normal again. We have never seen a train accident of this magnitude," said Mukesh, a relative of Baliyan, who lives in the neighbouring house.
The S-2 coach suffered such a huge impact that all its wheels were ripped off as it climbed atop the badly mangled pantry car. For 24 hours, its one end perched precariously atop one carriage while its other end, totalled by the impact, rammed into the house.
And, as the NDRF rescue teams rolled in from neighbouring Ghaziabad, and began to pull out the bodies, distraught locals gathered in larger numbers to the site of the accident, as the scale of the tragedy that struck at about 5:40 pm, began to sink in.
The body of a middle-aged woman was pulled out at around 3 am on the night of the accident, after three-hour labour by the rescue team which used sophisticated equipment to make sure the body was not damaged any further.
Her body was trapped beneath an overturned carriage that had hit the facade of a college building near the tracks, heightening the scale of the tragedy.
The weight of the tragedy was so huge, it wasn't just the local administration and railway authorities who spent sleepless night, almost the entire city had lost sleep due to the sheer magnitude of the disaster, that had befallen this town.
And, as the dawn broke over the horizon, restoration work was already underway, but the extent of the damage was so huge, the work to clear the tracks went on till around 6 pm, capping 24 hours of dramatic events.
The sight of the mangled coaches being hauled off by 140 -tonne cranes, brought especially from Delhi, against the backdrop of a clear blue sky in the morning, further revealed the extent of the damage.
Curious onlookers had gathered on the rooftops of their houses, boundary walls of fields, and near the tracks, till the point security allowed them, jostling against each other to catch a glimpse of the heavy coaches being taken off the tracks through herculean efforts of the man and the machine.
At about 6 pm on Sunday, when the dangling S-2 coach was finally removed, with due care, the owners of the house and perhaps the whole town heaved a sigh of relief.
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