Video shows India police pushing train carriage away from fire, not 'trying to bump-start' it

"For the first time in 75 years, they have to bump-start a train," reads a Hindi-language tweet posted on July 10, 2023.

The clip shows a group of men, including police officers and soldiers, pushing a train carriage.

The video was shared in similar posts on Facebook and here and here on Twitter -- which is being rebranded as "X".

The posts surfaced after a triple-train collision killed nearly 300 people in June in India's eastern Odisha state (archived link).

The crash occurred when a packed passenger train was mistakenly diverted onto a loop line and slammed into a stationary goods train loaded with iron ore.

Image

Screenshot of the misleading Tweet taken on July 14, 2023.

Some of the posts criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for India's "failed" railways.

"Congratulations to Modi and BJP," one person commented in an apparently sarcastic remark, referring to Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"This is the first time in Independent India that a train is being pushed to start. This is how they are pushing the failing economy."

Another wrote: "They only take credit for flagging new trains, but this is the reality of the Indian railway system, failed."

Train fire

Keyword searches found the original video in a report about men pushing carriages away from a part of the train that caught fire on July 7 in Telangana in southern India.

The report by Indian broadcaster NDTV quoted a local railway authority saying that the people in the video "manually moved" to a carriage to stop the spread of the blaze (archived link).

"To restrict the spread of the fire to other coaches, the rear portion consisting of 3 coaches - S1 and 2 General Coaches were detached and manually moved away by dedicated railway staff and local police," the South Central Railway said.

Below is a screengrab comparison of the video seen in the misleading posts (left) and that seen on the NDTV website (right):

Image

Screenshot comparison of the misleading post (left) and NDTV video (right)

Various Indian outlets also reported on the train fire, including the ANI news agency and The News Minute (archived links here and here).

The official spokesperson for Indian Railway confirmed that carriages were delinked to prevent the spread of fire (archived link).

"Railway personnel and Local police joined hands to detach the rear coaches & avoid further spread of fire. Our gratitude to the alert police personnel for responding promptly," the Spokesperson Railways posted on July 10.

South Central Railways posted saying the video showed "emergency action" to "avoid further spread of fire" (archived link).

Local police also praised their officers for helping the efforts and shared a photo of police pushing the bogies to detach them from the rest of the train.

Meanwhile, an engineer said it was not possible to bump-start a train.

"No carriage made in India is self-propelled and they all require a locomotive to run. They cannot start on their own or by pushing as they don't have power," Syed Faizan, assistant research officer at the Ministry of Railway's research and development wing told AFP.

He added that only Electric Multiple Unit carriages (EMU) and Vande Bharat Trains could run without a locomotive as they had electric motors -- but the train in the video was not one of these.

Image