Investigations into the Balasore train tragedy have confirmed that error and negligence on the part of the Signal and Telecommunication department staff had led to the tragic rail accident on June 2.
Commissioner of railway safety A M Chowdhary of South-Eastern zone said, “Lapses at multiple levels in the S&T department were responsible for this (Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express) accident.” Some of these lapses included wrong labelling of wires.
While executing signalling work (related to replacement of electric lifting barrier for level crossing gate no 94) at the railway station on June 2 evening, the S&T staff were misled by anomalies like wrong labelling of wires inside the level-crossing location box (2015), which remained undetected for years, past red-flags (2018) were ignored too, which ultimately led to mix-up during maintenance work.