The Dibrugarh-bound Kamrup Express had to be halted at the Jalpaiguri Road station for around five hours on Friday as a coupling connecting the loco and the first coach was about to get detached.

When the train from Howrah reached the Jalpaiguri Road station at 6.38am, a railway pointsman noticed that the coupling had got detached. He immediately alerted the officials at the station to the technical glitch.

It took close to five hours to carry out the repair and the train left for Assam at 11.32am.

“The coupling had almost got disengaged and somehow the train reached the Jalpaiguri Road station. If the train had resumed its journey and gained speed, there would have been the possibility of an accident,” said Rajeev Lochan Jha, the traffic inspector at the Jalpaiguri Road station.

Railway officials informed the passengers about the technical fault and said the train would resume the journey after the repair.

A team of technical staff and a loco reached the station from New Jalpaiguri and carried out the repair.

While the repair progressed, some passengers bound for Alipurduar and Cooch Behar alighted from the train. They headed for NH27 to take buses and cars to reach their destinations.

Hundreds of passengers, particularly those in AC coaches, faced inconveniences during the five-hour halt at the Jalpaiguri Road station. “There is no power in the coaches. The AC is not working and there is no light inside. There is no water in the washrooms either,” said Roza Shetty, a passenger travelling to Guwahati.

Some other passengers said there was a power outage after the train had left the New Jalpaiguri station.

“It was suffocating inside. We hope the railway authorities will make all necessary inspections to ensure the safety of passengers. It is worrying to know that there was a risk of an accident if the train had left this station with the disengaged coupling,” said Prasenjit Majumdar, another passenger.

Dilip Singh, the Alipurduar divisional railway manager of the Northeast Frontier Railway, confirmed the near detachment of the coupling.

“That was why there was a disruption in the power supply in the coaches. We got another engine and took the train to a different platform so that regular services didn’t get affected on the route,” he said.