While Railway inquiries, rather high level inquiries are expected to bring to surface the cause of an Accident, but the Inside story of the inquiries are unbelievably harrowing I will narrate one of such experiences:
I was shouldering the responsibility of maintenace of Signalling equipments at Varanasi in the year 1970 or so. There was an accident of DADAR - Varanasi express on the station with a steam shunting engine. The real story was that the express was brought to a halt at the Routing Signal (in violation of SWR, according to which the train was to be received on the PF, without stop at Home or Routing). Furthermore, no shunting was permitted in face of an approaching train, but this Rule was also overlooked.
The Stn Supdt was himself supervising the reception of the exp and the shunting operation. The shunting pilot was instructed to stop at the last moment and the concerned Shunt Signal was put to ON (a colour light signal), while the Routing Signal was lowered for reception of the Exp. The Steam engine shunter could not listen to the STOP instruction repeated on the loudspeaker, presumably becz of the noise in the engine and being mentally buisy, while the Shunt Signal was overlooked, having seen it in OFF position once and having a set of instructions to complete the shunting operation.
The SS was solely responsible, who wanted to be a champion of good workers, but the poor shunter was held responsible and slaughtered in the inquiry, who being a driver is always supposed to be vigilant and cautious as per Rules, and the SS was left scotfree. The reason being that the SS can oblige any officer but the shunter can not. . I was snubbed and disallowed to participate in the inquiry by the HIGH LEVEL OFFICERS. Thats the inside story of Rly working. Another story at some other point of time.
