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Twenty-year-old Ruby Gupta was to get married on 1 December in Mau in Uttar Pradesh.
Now, she is desperately looking for her father in Pukhrayan, Kanpur with a fractured arm, after the Indore-Patna Express carrying her family derailed, killing over 120 people.
The eldest of her siblings, Ruby was travelling with sisters Archna (18), Khushi (16), brothers Abhishek and Vishal, and father Ram Prasad Gupta.
Ruby is one of the hundreds of survivors in the rail mishap after 14 coaches of 19321 Indore-Rajendranagar Patna Express derailed near Pukharayan district of Kanpur. At least 126 bodies have been recovered and over 200 people have been injured according to preliminary counts. Several bodies are still reported to be trapped under the wreckage.
Two children were pulled out alive from an overturned bogie of the Indore-Patna Express, offering a glimmer of hope to rescuers looking for survivors among the heaps of metal and scattered baggage.
The two boys were aged six and seven with a woman, probably the mother of the boys, found dead near them.
After the accident, rescuers have been working round-the-clock to rescue survivors who are trapped under mangled train compartments.
As rescue operations are underway in Kanpur, survivors of the Indore-Patna Express derailment are reeling from the shock of the accident and are desperately looking for their relatives, reports the Hindustan Times.
A passenger from Indore, travelling with her two brothers and three sisters, was also looking for her siblings.
Anxious relatives of nearly 200 passengers who boarded the ill-fated Indore-Patna Express rushed to the local railway station and made frantic inquires to know the whereabouts of their loved ones. Ajay Jha is running a help centre at the Indore railway station in coordination with the Government Railway Police (GRP).
However, Government Railway Police Superintendent Maheshchandra Jain said that they have not received any official list of the victims of the accident.
Vimlesh Kumar, a gateman at 206E Gate falling under North Central Railways (NCR), is accustomed to watching minor accidents on the track. What he witnesses on Sunday, however, he will never forget, he told Hindustan Times.
Vimlesh, who took charge of the night duty around 12 am, was the first prime witness to the accident.
After he heard a noise, different from that of a train, Vimlesh knew something was wrong.
“I pulled my head out of the cabin and saw fumes and sparks all around. I sat down for a minute as I couldn’t connect myself to the situation and it took me a good 50 seconds to realise that it was a crash,” he said.
Four-year-old Adarsh Pandey is one of the injured admitted in the Pukhrayan Community Health Centre (CHC) in Kanpur. Lying on the bed with a fractured leg, Adarsh looks at the phone that a policeman holds for him. He was asked to identify his father from looking at all the photos of dead victims, The Indian Express reported.
A crying Adarsh could not fathom what’s happening. Doctors said he was too traumatised to talk, but managed to convey that he was travelling to Kanpur with his parents.
“Kanpur ja rahe the, mausi ke yahan ja rahe the (We were going to Kanpur, to my aunt’s place),” The Indian Express reported him as saying.
(With inputs from Hindustan Times and The Indian Express.)
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