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A video filmed from inside the locomotive is going viral for the worst possible reason. In it, the loco pilot can be heard shouting that his brakes are not working. He tries the emergency brakes. Seconds later, the train leaves the tracks. On Wednesday morning, November 11, that is exactly what happened to the Kolkata–Sairang Express at Digaru station in Assam — the locomotive and five coaches derailed.
Everyone on board survived. Four people had minor injuries, according to Assam's chief minister; the railway said there were no major injuries. But the footage, and the railway's own account, leave the central question unanswered: why could the driver not stop his train?
What happened at Digaru
The 13125 Kolkata–Sairang Express was coming into Digaru station in Assam at around 6:54 am, being received there to give precedence to another train. According to a press release from the Chief Public Relations Officer of the Northeast Frontier Railway, the loco pilot could not control the train's speed — and the train derailed. The locomotive and five coaches went off the tracks. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said four people had minor injuries and were being cared for.
Relief and rescue operations began immediately. The General Manager of the Northeast Frontier Railway and other senior officials rushed to the site, and arrangements were made to move the passengers onward by an alternate train. Services on the section were regulated while the line was cleared, with the Guwahati–Jorhat Town Jan Shatabdi Express held at Panbari and the Coimbatore–Silchar Express at Panikhaiti.
What the video shows — and what it does not prove
The viral video tells a sharper story. The pilot is heard shouting that the brakes are not working, that the emergency brakes have failed too, and that even the engine's own brakes have stopped working. Passengers in the video say the train kept moving for about a kilometre after it left the rails.
Those are claims inside a viral clip, not findings. The railway has not said the brakes failed. Its wording is careful — the pilot "could not control its speed" — and it says the cause of that loss of speed control will be examined in its inquiry. Until that inquiry reports, brake failure is a possibility, not a conclusion.
Early reporting has also disagreed on the basics. The railway's press release says five coaches derailed and nobody was seriously injured; some television coverage on the day put the figure at six coaches and reported several injured. The final count is whatever the inquiry settles on.
What the first inquiry found
Two days after the derailment, a six-member probe team's preliminary findings — reported by PTI on November 13 — pointed to a possible failure of the train's main braking system. A brake pipe angle cock, the valve that controls the flow of compressed air needed to apply the brakes across the coaches, was found in an isolated, or closed, condition in the locomotive. With it closed, the brakes may never have been applied at all.
The sequence the investigators are examining starts earlier that morning. The train had already stopped at Panbari station at 6:16 am after the wheels of one coach overheated because its brake pads had jammed. Advisories issued by railway divisions after the accident raised the possibility that the angle cock was closed during repair work at Panbari and never reopened before the train departed. The train then overshot a red signal at Digaru, struck a dead end and derailed.
None of this is a final finding. The preliminary report does not establish who closed the valve, or whether the crew failed to check it before departure — and the crew told investigators the braking system was working properly when they took charge of the train at Guwahati at around 5:30 am. A high-level investigation is now under way, and the railway says it is examining the loco pilot's own video recordings as part of it.
A worrying pattern on the same network
This is not the Northeast Frontier Railway's first derailment in recent weeks. On October 29, the front trolley of the Silchar–Guwahati Express locomotive came off the rails between Badarpur and Sukritipur stations in Assam's hill section, disrupting services across the Barak Valley. Nobody was hurt, and the cause was never publicly established.
Two derailments in a fortnight on the same network — and in the October case, no established cause at all. That is the pattern that should worry passengers more than any single accident: the same questions about track, rolling stock and safety systems keep coming back, and the answers keep arriving late.
What happens next
The inquiry into the Digaru derailment will have something unusual to work with: cabin audio from the seconds before the crash. It is rare to have a recording of a driver realising, in real time, that his train will not stop — and it will now be weighed against the locomotive's data logs, the brakes, and the signalling at Digaru.
On the ground, the line is already back in use. The railway said train movement had returned to normal, with three of the five derailed coaches repaired and the remaining two due to be fixed the same night. Three trains were cancelled because of the accident — the Guwahati–Haibargaon Express and the Guwahati–New Jalpaiguri Intercity in both directions.
The good news from Digaru is the human outcome — everyone walked away from a train that left the rails at speed. The harder question is mechanical. A train that cannot be stopped is a train no timetable can make safe — and until the inquiry explains why this one could not be controlled, the footage will keep being replayed as evidence that something in the chain broke.
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Sources: News Desk Report, NDTV, The New Indian Express (PTI, Nov 13 — preliminary probe findings)