The cave-in had occurred on Wednesday, 10 days after the quake, and a portion of NH55 along with the toy tracks was washed away when the landslide struck followed by heavy rainfall.
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR), which is in charge of the toy train, had been worried about the 30 cracks in the Tindharia workshop building, 30km from here. Around 60 metres of the boundary wall on the rear of the workshop, too, had collapsed in the earthquake. The recent cave-in, just below the right side of the building, has now added to the worry.
“The workshop is an old structure established almost 100 years ago. There were already 30 cracks on the wall and the floor, some of them two-inches wide. Now after the cave-in, the problem has aggravated. The vertical distance between the road and the workshop is just 200 metres. Another bout of heavy rainfall may cause the slope in between as well as the damaged portion of the workshop to collapse,” said R.P. Singh, the assistant divisional mechanical engineer at the Tindharia workshop.
The workshop that was established in 1915 is famous for having manufactured many toy train locomotives in the past. Among them are loco 42, named Tindharia and built in 1919, number 43, which was called Kurseong and made in 1923, and number 44 christened Darjeeling and manufactured in 1925. Now, the workshop with its 90 employees who are mainly local people, only repairs steam locos and coaches. The damaged portion of the building comprises a wheel shop where wheels of the toy trains are made and repaired. The DHR officials alleged that although the Northeast Frontier Railway’s headquarters in Assam’s Malegaon had been intimated, there has been no specific instruction yet on the relocation of the wheel shop.
“A team of NFR engineers had inspected the workshop. But we have not received any instruction on relocating the wheel shop to a safer site in the workshop. We cannot initiate the relocating process on our own since the machinery is heavy. No restoration work has started either,” a DHR official said.
Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111003/jsp/siliguri/story_14581527.jsp