Railway authorities in northern India reported that a freight train that had gotten away from its driver on Sunday covered almost 45 miles at a speed of up to 46 miles per hour before coming to a halt.
The train's journey was documented in a video that quickly went viral on social media and showed it speeding along the tracks close to a station platform.
The runaway train eventually came to a stop by putting stones on the track and applying emergency brakes, sparing no one serious injury.
According to Prateek Srivastava, director of the Ministry of Railways in Jammu and Kashmir, the train traveled for roughly 1.5 hours from the Kathua railway station in the state of Jammu and Kashmir before coming to a stop in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab state on Monday.
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"Due to reasons unknown, the (locomotive) pilot and the assistant pilot got off. As soon as they left, the train started rolling down. They could not get on to it," he added.
Srivastava said the train was eventually diverted onto a path with an uphill gradient. "We knew gravity would help us," he added.
Following an investigation into the incident, at least four individuals have been suspended, and a high-level inquiry is presently taking place at Kathua Railway Station.
Up to 1,000 people were on a runaway train in April 2018 that rolled for several miles before coming to an emergency stop.
Social media footage shows the train moving from the western state of Gujarat to the eastern state of Odisha, racing past stations while bystanders and passengers let out helpless screams.
Railway workers eventually brought the train to a crunching halt by placing wooden wedges on the tracks.
The train arrived at its destination two hours late, but none of the approximately 1,000 passengers were hurt in the incident.
Under British colonial rule, India's vast rail network—one of the biggest in the world—was constructed more than 160 years ago. It operates 11,000 trains daily over 67,000 miles of tracks in the most populous country on earth.
When two passenger trains and a freight train collided in Odisha state in June of last year, at least 275 people were killed and over 1,000 injured, making it one of the deadliest rail disasters in Indian history.
