THANE: The Thane Sessions Court on Tuesday reserved its order on the anticipatory bail pleas of two accused railway engineers in the June 9 Mumbra train accident, which left five dead and over 15 injured. Additional Sessions Judge G.T. Pawar will pronounce the verdict on Wednesday.
The accused engineers – assistant divisional engineer Vishal Dolas, senior section engineer Samar Yadav – were booked on November 1 by the Thane Government Railway Police (GRP) under Sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 125(a)(b) (acts endangering life or personal safety of others) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023. According to the GRP, the accused allegedly failed to repair a damaged section of the track between Mumbra and Diva despite multiple caution orders issued to them between March and June 2025.
During Tuesday’s hearing, both sides presented their arguments before the court. The GRP cited a study by Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Matunga, quoting that it allegedly found serious lapses in maintenance, which contributed to the accident. The ballast had been washed away due to an overflowing drain passing under the line, causing the trains to tilt toward each other, stated the report. The collision led to passengers brushing against each other and falling from the trains. The report also noted that despite four caution orders issued, the implicated engineers never inspected the site. Some tracks that required welding work were only tended to after the June 9 incident, it said. SB Shirsat, Assistant Commissioner of Police, GRP, Mumbai, said in the court that although the railways had prescribed a speed limit of 75 km/h for the curved section between Mumbra and Diva, trains were running faster. Only after the accident was it reduced to 35 km/h, he said.
The GRP added that statements from the motorman of the Kasara-CSMT train indicated the service was running 12 minutes late, leading to overcrowding. Defence lawyer Baldev Rajput, however, argued that crowd management was the responsibility of the GRP, not railways.
Rajput claimed that the accident was caused by overcrowding, protruding backpacks, and passengers standing on the footboard, not by track defects. He also pointed out that the collision occurred several hundred feet away from the section cited by the GRP.
The defence further questioned the validity of the VJTI report, claiming the institute’s analysis was theoretical and lacked practical railway experience. Rajput said that an internal railway investigation by five technical experts had already found no fault with the track, and had the GRP reviewed that report, no FIR would have been filed.
In response, the GRP stated that no backpacks were found at the site during the panchnama. Despite repeated requests, the railway authorities did not share their internal report in time, they claimed. The GRP’s investigation also included statements from over 30 witnesses, gathered through emails, phone calls, WhatsApp, and invited by public notices published in 17 newspapers.
The bench stated that crowd management falls under the jurisdiction of the Railway Protection Force (RPF), not the GRP, and questioned why the railway’s report had been withheld. The defence replied that the report was completed on September 20 and handed over to the GRP on November 3, two days after the FIR was registered.
The railway’s counsel also claimed that routine Ancillary Monitoring had shown no issues on the affected track. Defence lawyers urged the court that there was no need to arrest the engineers and grant anticipatory bail, asserting that the engineers were not responsible for the mishap and, being government employees and permanent residents, they would not escape. As both agencies share the same premises, the engineers can be made available for the investigations whenever needed by the GRP.