Odisha train crash: Love poems found scattered on tracks

Scattered sheets of paper, with poems in Bengali professing love, were strewn on the tracks beside a mangled coach of the Coromandel Express as rescuers rummaged through belongings of the victims at the rail mishap site in Odisha's Balasore district, less than 48 hours after the train crash, billed as one of the worst in Indian railway history.

The jottings on torn pages of a diary with sketches of elephants, fish and sun on the other side, were probably written during the leisure time of a passenger whose identity is not known as yet.

"Alpo alpo megh theke halka bristi hoy, chotto chotto golpo theke bhalobasa sristi hoy" (scattered clouds lead to light rains, (while) love blossoms from the little tales we hear)," the handwritten poem said.

Photographs of these pages have gone viral on social media.

Another half finished poem which was on another loose page said "Bhalobeshei toke chai sarakhhon, achis tui moner sathe "(With love I need you at all times, you are there in my mind at all time )

Netizens commented that these were "heart rending", and showed how "life was unpredictable".

Till now no one has come forward to claim the poems or relationship with the poet, whose fate too is unkown, local police officers said.

Government on Sunday said that both the Up and Down railway tracks at Balasore accident site have been repaired.

Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw tweeted that track linking Up-line has been restored and overhead electification work has also started.

"Track linking of Up-line has been done at 16.45 hours. Overhead electrification work started," Vaishnaw tweeted on Sunday.

He had earlier tweeted that the down line which links Howrah has been restored.

Officials said this implies that at least one set of railway tracks were now fit for trains, but more time will be required to fix all tracks, which include loop lines, at the Balasore accident site.

However, till the overhead electric cable are repaired, only diesel locomotives can be run on the two line which have been repaired.

Once the overhead electric lines are repaired, electric trains can start plying. They indicated that this would take another three days.

Three trains Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express, Bengaluru-Howrah super fast and a goods train were involved in the pile-up on Friday, being described as one of India's worst train accidents.

The Coromandel Express rammed into a stationary goods train and many of its carriages overturned including some onto another train, the Bengaluru-Howrah superfast express, which was also passing by at the same time on Friday.