Was lucky to get berth near door

The shock of the fire accident that claimed scores of victims on the Chennai-bound Tamil Nadu Express had visibly shaken Chithra, even though she reached Chennai unscathed. As she completed a phone call in a trembling voice, she turned around to narrate the fateful moments that devoured numerous lives.

“Fire! Fire! was the scream that woke me up from my sleep,” she recalled, gesturing with her hands at the Chennai Central. As a passenger “who was lucky enough” to get a berth right next to the door, Chithra said the entire coach was engulfed in smoke by the time she opened her eyes. This was only a few minutes after the train had passed the Nellore station. “I remember passengers bolting the doors and windows due to the incessant rain during the journey. Then around 4.30 am, suddenly there were screams and people were trying to move from one end of the coach towards my corner,” she said, adding that her berth was right next to the passageway between S10 and the ill-fated S11 coaches.

When Chithra realised the gravity, she leaped off her berth and pulled the chain. “The train halted immediately and 10 to 15 of us jumped off the train,” she recalled, attributing her “luck” to Providence.

‘Really Hot Inside the Coach When We Woke’

When she and her co-passengers saw the coach from the outside, they couldn’t believe themeselves, as the raging blaze was melting away the steel railings.

Sajad Ahmed from Jammu and Kashmir boarded the train in New Delhi along with two of his friends. Their idea was to reach Chennai and then proceed to Annamalai University where they had applied for M Phil admissions. But everything went awry in between.

“When we woke up after it got really hot inside the coach, we couldn’t even see as there was thick smoke. I woke my friends and we jumped off the train,” he said, recalling the cries of people from the area in the coach where the fire probably started.

People who traveled in other compartments too had similar tales. Ishan Shah, a techie working in Chennai who was allotted a berth in S10, said when he saw the smoke, he instinctively decided to escape through the emergency windows.

“I took a video of the train once I jumped out. None of us could do anything as the fire was raging. We were praying frantically,” he recalled.

Passengers said that after the initial few minutes, mobile phone networks were jammed, making it difficult to keep in touch with relatives back home.

Devanathan, a traveler on S12 coach, said people rushed towards the engine to find water once the fire was detected. “When the chain was pulled, part of the train was actually on a small bridge,” he said.

He also recollected a couple weeping inconsolably after it was learnt that their 10-year-old son was charred to death, even as they had escaped. There was also an unconfirmed report of a youth who went back into the raging compartment to recover his degree certificates, but never returned.9