Back to Basics | Part 1: Seventeen Days—Seven Events—Three Reached a Portal
Editorial Note: This part rests on an internal railway message, on a whistleblower’s email, and on the press. Any clarification or counter from the Railway Board will be printed in full.
Between 21 August and 6 September 2026 this publication counted seven events on the Indian Railways that belong in one list. Two averted collisions. Two derailments. A Duronto that came apart. Two trains that passed a signal at danger and, a whistleblower says, were never entered on the safety portal. The Minister reviewed safety in the middle of that fortnight. Here is the list, and here is why the railway’s own count of it is wrong.
First, what worked
Start with the trap point at Ara.
At 04:12 on 6 September 2026 the 15483 Sikkim Mahananda Express, running from Alipurduar to Delhi, passed the starter signal of the loop line at Ara station in Bihar while that signal showed red. Beyond a loop line there is a trap point, a short piece of rail that turns a runaway train off the line before it can reach the main line, and at Ara it did exactly that, sending the train onto a siding where two coaches left the rails and nobody was hurt.
That is a #SPAD, a signal passed at danger, and it is also an averted collision, saved by the design of the yard and not by the crew or by any officer. Say that first, because it is true and because the railway will say it too.
The crew had 10 hours 52 minutes of rest before signing on. This publication argued in Part VI of The Tyranny of Traffic that fatigue is manufactured upstream of the cab. It was. Here the record does not show fatigue. So the charge here is not about rest.
It is about what the railway does with the information.
The seven
Seven events in seventeen days.
- On 21 August 2026 a passenger train at Bondamunda Link C cabin on South Eastern Railway took the wrong line over a crossover while the signal showed green. A collision was averted, the railway reported it, and the Minister discussed it on 3 September. This publication set out the mechanism in Balasore, Again.
- A second case of the same class, a point that reported itself set when it was not, occurred on another zonal railway—East Coast Railway at Puri—as per information—before the review. It was reported to this publication. It was not discussed at the review. The railway has not published a date for it.
- On 24 August 2026, a whistleblower writes, a special train in the Prayagraj division of North Central Railway overshot the intermediate block signal at Dabhaura by half an engine length. The whistleblower says the division did not enter it on #SIMS, the Safety Information Management System, because nothing was hit.
- On 26 August 2026, the same whistleblower writes, a train crossed an automatic signal in the yard at GMC in the Lucknow division of Northern Railway. Same result. Nothing entered.
- On 3 September 2026, the morning the Minister held his review, the Howrah to Pune Duronto Express parted in two as it left the loop line at Gidhni, beyond Kharagpur on South Eastern Railway. The coupling between two coaches opened at low speed. Nobody was hurt. The UP line stood blocked for over an hour and the railway has begun an inquiry.
- On 4 September 2026 at about 20:00 a mail train derailed at Kamakhya on Northeast Frontier Railway, seven coaches off the rails and the main line blocked, according to a report received by this publication.
On 6 September 2026, Ara.
Three of the seven are on a portal somewhere. Four are not, or not yet, or not where a reader can find them.
The whistleblower’s line
The whistleblower who wrote to this publication on 29 August put the reporting culture in one sentence, in Hindi. It is printed as sent.
“Jab tak derailment nahi ho aur 100-50 mare nahi, tab tak SPAD report karke gaali kyo khayen, better hai ek saath gaali khayenge.”
Until there is a derailment and fifty or a hundred dead, why take the abuse for reporting a SPAD? Better take it all at once.
The whistleblower adds that the penalty for one murder is death, and the penalty for a thousand murders is also death. So the railway has built a system in which a hidden Signal Passing At Danger (#SPAD) costs nothing and a reported one costs a charge sheet.
Is the whistleblower right? This publication cannot count what was never entered. That is the point.
What a hidden SPAD destroys
Here is a belief this publication holds and cannot prove. No loco pilot passes a signal at danger on purpose. The price is his life or his job. There is no middle path.
If that is true, then every SPAD is information about the system, not about the man. The signal sighting, the roster, the brake, the lobby, and the eleven hours of rest that were not eleven hours of sleep.
A SPAD that is reported can be read, but a SPAD that is hidden is information destroyed, and the next loco pilot on that section inherits the same signal, the same roster, the same lobby and the same silence, with nothing on the record to warn him.
After the Bilaspur collision of 4 November 2025, in which eleven people died, the Minister declined the usual answer of human error and asked what leads trained people to make fatal mistakes. Part VI of this publication’s first series recorded that question. It was the right question. A hidden SPAD makes it unanswerable.
Forty eight minutes
One more number from Ara.
The train passed the signal at 04:12. The internal message says the divisional control learnt of it at 05:00. Forty eight minutes, for a mail train standing derailed at a station.
The message does not say why, so this publication asks: who knew at 04:15, and who did they tell? If the answer is that the station knew and the control did not, then the reporting problem is not confined to the portal, because it begins at the platform, in the first hour, before anybody has decided what to call the event.
Who was in a position to prevent this
Not the crew at Dabhaura or GMC, who did report, to somebody, or the whistleblower would not know.
The office that decided the report should go no further. In each division that is a small number of people, and every one of them was in a position to prevent the next SPAD by letting the first one be read.
Above them, the office that built a portal on which a division is punished for what it enters and rewarded for what it hides. #WhoBuiltThePortal.
The ask
Two things, both checkable.
First, every zonal railway to publish, per division per month, two numbers side by side: SPADs entered on SIMS, and SPADs known to the divisional control from its own log. When the second exceeds the first, the reader will know what the division chose to do.
Second, a channel on which a loco pilot, an assistant loco pilot or a station master can report a SPAD without a charge sheet following the report, of the kind the airlines have had for years, because at present the railway’s confidential channel is a whistleblower writing to a website.
Publish both numbers. Then count the difference.
Till then, political leadership must understand that there is overall failure to create a culture of safety. When speaking truth invites punishment and charlatans get rewarded for just being corrupt-incentive structure is not leaning towards safety.
In this series
Part 2 asks what the officers were looking at instead, and finds the social calendar.
Further reads on this site:
Sep 4, 2026: The Cockroaches of Railways | Part 12: The Minister Counted the Point Machines. That Is the Failure
Aug 24, 2026: Balasore, Again | Part I: The Letter Sixty Days Before
Jul 21, 2026: Part VI: The Tyranny of Traffic—Keep the man waiting at the gate