Kota rail division probes if senior officials flouted motor trolley safety norm, beat signal staff. The Kota Rail Division has initiated a probe after a signal staff alleged that senior engineering officials assaulted him when he tried to stop them from using motor trolleys for track maintenance in blatant violation of safety norms and causing obstructions in train movements on July 5, 2025.
“A committee of senior divisional signal and telecom engineer and senior divisional engineer has been nominated to inquire about the allegations,” Anil Kalra, Kota Divisional Railway Manager. Signal and telecom union, which rallied behind the staff, said that a similar incident of unauthorised motor trolley use in the Sonpur Rail Division resulted in a serious accident, killing a track maintainer and injuring three workers on June 20, 2025.
The staff, in a written complaint addressed to the DRM, alleged that around 3 pm on July 5, the divisional engineer , assistant engineer and senior section engineer along with a team of track maintainers placed the motor trolley on the track from the Piloda railway station without any intimation to the authorities concerned.
He added that their unsafe action caused a technical failure between the two stations Piloda and Odai, which resulted in about half-an-hour delay in the operation of Bayana-Jaipur Express. He alleged that when he tried to stop those officials, they assaulted him, tore his clothes and dragged him on the track in a very humiliating manner.
“The signal staff got a message from the control room that a motor trolley has entered the Piloda-Odai section, causing technical failure. The control room also asked the signal staff to take a picture of the trolley. When the staff objected to the unauthorised use of trolley and started taking pictures, these senior officials and workers assaulted and humiliated him,” Navin Kumar, national president, IRSTMU, alleged.
Kumar said that they should have taken permission from the Control Department before using the trolley for the maintenance of the track.
“Even the Railway Board, two days after this incident on July 7, 2025 issued a circular banning all trolley work without prior permission from the control room. The board’s letter specifically mentioned the train-trolley collision in the Sonpur division,” Alok Chandra Prakash, general secretary, IRSTMU, said. “If senior-level officials will start violating safety norms of train operations, what moral authority do they have on their juniors to ask them to follow the safety norms? I request the rail administration to take a serious note of this issue,” he added.
