No Vellore residents in Coromandel Express

VELLORE: No passengers from Vellore district were travelling in the Chennai-bound Coromandel Express that met with an accident at Balasore in Odisha, said the round-theclock control room started in the collectorate on Saturday.

The control room with the numbers 1077, 0416- 2258016 (land line) and 93480-56214 (mobile) is being manned in three shifts, officials said. Officials revealed that they had collected a list of 850 names of passengers from the Southern Railway HQ at Chennai and checked if any of them were from Vellore.

“We spoke to some passengers and asked them to check if any of their neighbours was from Vellore district. One passenger was thus identified, but when contacted, he said he was from Tirupattur district and was on his way in the relief train coming to Chennai,” an official revealed.

Similarly, officials said there was no queries on help desk set up by the Katpadi railway station to register for those who wanted to travel to hospital to meet injured relatives.

Similarly, the Christian Medical College, which also maintains a help desk at the Katpadi railway station to direct passengers from other states who disembark here to its hospitals in both Vellore town and at Kannigapuram, said they had also not received any Balasore accident queries on Saturday.