Miscreants break signal box, 40 local services cancelled

Miscreants are causing trouble with your daily local train commute on the Central Railway (CR) every day. Two such incidents have rocked the CR in the last four days. On the night of April 12-13, miscreants stole cables at Panvel that led to massive disruption in the signalling system.

This further led to cancellation of 40 train services and 82 services were delayed on Wednesday. According to CR officials, on Tuesday night at around 12.20 am miscreants broke open the signal box and pulled out 20 signal cables that disturbed the working of at least 12 signal poles in and around Panvel railway station.

“When our staff came to know about the disruption, we immediately inspected the situation and they found that these signal cables had been forcibly plucked out,” said a CR official.

Fixing up each cable takes a lot of time. The CR engineers finally managed to fix them by 7 am on Wednesday morning. However, by then the damage had been done. The morning peak hours were hit as trains were running late, or had to be cancelled. CR officials said that these cables don’t have copper wires in them and so the miscreants won’t get anything even if sold them; yet Mumbaikars were severely affected due to the disruption.

Likewise on Sunday, a train’s coach caught fire owing to a foreign object kept by a miscreant. An internal inquiry report found that someone had put an external object in the air vent of the motor coach which is not fire retardant. This led to the blaze, following which the train halted at Thane station.

In another incident caused by a miscreant on Sunday, a train coach caught fire owing to an object kept in the air vent of the motor coach