Strike hits train maintenance

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Thousands of passengers on board at least five express trains that started from Chennai Central on Monday were forced to put up with unkempt and stinky toilets besides dust-ridden berths as maintenance staff at the Basin Bridge Coach Depot went on a flash strike on Monday.

Train no: 1042 bound for Mumbai, 2695 for Trivandrum, 2603 for Hyderabad, 2685 for Mangalore and 2669 for Chaapra via Nagpur left Chennai Central without the daily interior and exterior cleaning, including the toilets. The agitation that continued beyond 4pm delayed the trains between 20 and 45 minutes.

The protesting staff admitted that even air conditioning systems could be affected owing to lack of daily maintenance, leaving passengers on board the three AC category coaches sweating.

There were also electrical and mechanical department employees among the nearly 1,000 employees who struck work condemning the “unsafe” and “unhygienic” working conditions that had allegedly claimed the life of one Anbu, a 55-year-old coach maintenance worker from Tiruvallur, who had slipped in a waterlogged pit-lane in the yard and sustained a head injury on Saturday. He had gone into coma and died at the hospital on Sunday.

The workers blamed the department of turning a blind eye to regular water stagnation in the pit lanes and accumulation of mechanical debris in the yard, which has now claimed two lives in a year. Late last year, a junior engineer on rolling inspection had slipped on the tracks and was run over by a train in the yard.

“It is their duty to ensure optimum comfort for the passengers. But, workers stand in knee deep sewage-like water to clean the trains,” complained SRMU divisional secretary Mr Paul Maxwell Johnson.