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ShareThane: The motorman and a passenger of a CST-Kalyan local were killed and 11 persons injured when a girder from abridge under construction fell on a water pipeline, which, in turn, collapsed on the moving train near Thane station at 10.40am on Friday.
With debris on the tracks, the Central line was blocked, disrupting suburban and long-distance traffic for the entire day -- 27 long-distance trains were cancelled and more than 20 were rescheduled.
Local services from Ghatkopar to CST and Thane to Kalyan, however, resumed within an hour of the accident. The Thane-CST line will be fully functional only by Saturday morning, Central Railway officials said.
With train services disrupted, there was chaos on the arterial roads leading to Mumbai.
The BEST undertaking started additional bus services between Mulund and Sion. Many commuters complained that auto drivers demanded 10 times the regular fare.
According to eyewitnesses, a 50-foot girder of the under-construction Kopri overbridge collapsed on the pipeline that runs parallel to it, and the pipeline fell on the motorman's cabin, smashing the windscreen.
"The train resembled a crushed paper-box," said Manoj Kale, a Jawhar resident, who jumped off the train in the nick of time.
The motorman, T Ramachandran, was buried under the mangled remains, and he began shouting for help. But the railways did not have the manpower or equipment to extricate him.
When the fire brigade arrived from Kalyan at 11 am with an ambulance, Ramachandran was alive. The firemen began cutting through the metal with gas-cutters but had to stop as the laminated interiors of the motorcar could have caught fire.
Passengers and bystanders brought water for him even as mechanical cutters sawed the metal sheets. As hope faded for Ramachandran with every passing minute, some people brought a table fan to help him breathe in his cabin.
Almost three hours later, the rescue team cut through the metal but Ramachandran was dead by then. They had to cut off his arm to extricate the body.
The passenger who died, Subhash Popat Nikam, 35, was a resident of Bhandup.
The injured were taken to Thane civil hospital.
