Demonetisation is out come of an honest and sincere effort to weed out black money. Similarly for IR. overnight improvement is quite possible if all the decisions making and working by officials & employees is done with honesty and sincerity, and with an aim of continuous improvement, keeping aside the malpractices of departmentalism, political expediency, corruption etc.
The reports are highly contradictory and appears to be deviating away from the right direction. It seems that efforts are on to confuse the common public through long rigmarole about the effect of low temperature on rails. The rail/track can withstand much lower temperature than the current mid night temperatures in the Gangetic Plains.
There...
more... is no mention of the loud sound in S1 coach which was heard by the AC coach paxs also and both complained to TTEs about the same but in vain. No rails/ tracks can be expected to safely bear the full speed run of a jammed/ defective wheel/bogie for a distance of over 200kms. No mention of coach defect and complain of paxs and reporting of driver about higher current/load on loco, indicates that the investigation is not moving in the right direction.
A broken piece of rail found at the site does not mean that derailment was result of broken rail, the broken rail may very well be a consequence of the accident and not the cause. Tremendous impact of the derailed wheel/bogie can break the rail, and lower temperature which tends to make a bit more brittle just promote it.
Another funny thing is blaming the ICF coaches. ICF coaches are satisfactorily being operated at 110kmph for several decades. If ill maintained or a defective coach is operated at 110kmph, coach of any make whether ICF or LHB shall derail. Due to ICF coaches, casualty is higher and with LHB it would have been lower.
Top priority should be on preventing recurrence of accidents, rather than on having lesser loss of lives in the event of accident. Replacing all ICF coaches about 55000 will cost above 1 Lac Crore Rs and is not going to happen soon. IR is hardly in a position to implement it. Then there is no point in crying hoarse over the matter.
15 years have passed after the LHB coaches were introduced and yet IR has not developed the self generation version of LHB coach which can replace the ICF coach of mail/ express trains. This shows there was no plan to use the good properties i.e. higher speed and better safety features for the general public travelling in IR trains (non-premiun ones).
Experts were against splurging the scarce resource of IR (in the early 90s) on very costly LHB coaches of 200kmph potential and there were allegation of kick backs in the deal too. This money should have gone into clearing the huge backlog of the track renewal existing during the 90s and making the rail journeys safer.
IR have a penchant for costly foreign imports which comes with a lot of foreign trips and other benefits, even if much cheaper and indigenous options are available. Lack of interest in cheaper ACD developed by Konkan Railway is recent example.
The real cause appears to be of manual error and the blame as usual shall go to mute machines who can not plead guilty!