Train services in Tripura, Mizoram hit for a week now due to flood, landslides

GUWAHATI — Train services in large parts of Tripura and some parts of Mizoram have been stopped for nearly a week now as the railway tracks were badly damaged due to the recent floods in the two northeastern states, officials said on Monday. 

An official of the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) said that since August 21, all the local trains and an express train (Kanchanjunga Express) running between Agartala and southern Tripura’s Belonia and Sabroom were cancelled as the tracks were badly damaged in these routes.

Similarly, trains were cancelled from August 21 on the Jamira (in Assam’s Hailakandi district)-Bairabi (Mizoram) route as the railway tracks were badly damaged due to the recent floods.

The NFR official said that engineers and workers have been working round-the-clock in the flood-affected sites of both Tripura and Mizoram to restore the railway services at the earliest.

People of southern Assam, Tripura, Mizoram and Manipur bear the brunt of floods every year during monsoon while the railway tracks, stations and other infrastructure get damaged due to the flood and landslides during the four-month-long monsoon, lasting from June to September.

The disruptions in train services during monsoon every year cause a major shortage of transport fuels like petrol and diesel and other essential goods in southern Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, and Manipur, which are all heavily dependent on fuel, essential items, food grains and other commodities from the outside.

The NFR officials said that besides the running of trains, works of ongoing railway projects were also badly affected during the monsoon period.

The catastrophic flood in Tripura since August 19 claimed at least 31 lives, affecting over 17 lakh people while 70,000 people are still in 471 relief camps. Landslides occurred in a record number of 2,066 places and many important highways, including National Highway 8, the lifeline of Tripura, have been damaged.