| Reuters Oddly Enough wrote: |
PATNA, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of Indian rail passengers got more than they had bargained for when the driver of their train asked them to get out and push.
It took more than half an hour to move the stalled electric train 12 feet so that it touched live overhead wires and was able to resume its journey, officials said on Wednesday.
The incident occurred in the eastern state of Bihar on Tuesday after a passenger pulled the train's emergency chain and it halted in a "neutral zone," a short length of track where there is no power in the overhead wires.
"In so many years of service in the railways, I have never come across such a bizarre incident," said Deepak Kumar Jha, a spokesman for Indian Railways.
A train's momentum usually allows it to continue moving through neutral zones.
India's rail network carries more than 15 million people daily -- more than the combined population of Norway and Sweden -- but its safety record often comes in for criticism. |
Source
Now I have been stranded while driving with friends and had to get out and push after they ran out of gas (petrol), but this is rather out of my league!At first I was lauging at this, but then I realized something... If this had happened here in the States, instead of spending half an hour helping to get it moving again, passengers here would have probably sat for two hours waiting for someone else to do something about the problem.
We can learn a lesson from all those people who got out and helped to push!
Some things are so normal however people don't tend to think of them in large scale.
Take say a evacuation, multiply it then and say evacuate the whole of New York, then you have a proper problem...
Just something I thought of when reading this..
Pushing trains sounds like fun! That is only if you do it once in a lifetime not daily! 
I wonder why the passenger pulled the emergency train, was it something important or on accident, or as a kind of prank? I hate how news articles don't tell you things like that sometimes and you're just left to wonder. Or wait a couple days and do eighty Google searches.
waw i'll think twice before i riade a eletrict train
I would have to think it more than a few times. I don't care how late the setback would make me for any business meeting. A hernia would only make me even later 
Well, with diesel trains there's danger of explosion (fuel tank), so I think going in a diesel train is quite a bit worse than going in an electric one. Electric ones are also a lot better for the environment. And here in Switzerland such problems are rather unlikely, there are no such dead zones as far as I know (I can ask my friend who knows quite a bt more on this, but it's extremely unlikely). However once I got stranded in the train station for about 10 minutes due to a power cut, but that's not quite the same thing. Well,, in my opinion, the passenger knew about the dead zone, wanted some fun, so he pulled the brake at the right moment.
Ah, this is one of the most awesome stories ever! I was teasing my girlfriend about this forever, when she lived over there she used to visit her family in Bihar regularly. Hilarious!
Seriously though, someone had to do it, and better the passengers on the train than wait for hours in the heat to get someone with a bulldozer out to a site in Patna.
I wouldn't mind, as long as everyone else was pushing, too...
| missdixy wrote: |
| I wouldn't mind, as long as everyone else was pushing, too... |
I'll push a car, possibly a (small) truck, and even a motorcycle uphill with a flat tire....but to push a (more than) 12,000 lbs machine? I can live without that bad back and hernia thank you very much. | suntzu3500 wrote: |
Ah, this is one of the most awesome stories ever! I was teasing my girlfriend about this forever, when she lived over there she used to visit her family in Bihar regularly. Hilarious!
Seriously though, someone had to do it, and better the passengers on the train than wait for hours in the heat to get someone with a bulldozer out to a site in Patna. |
It Would have been even funnier Had the bulldozer run out of gas 
