A train driver who probably didn’t realise that the coupling between the engine and the first compartment had snapped chugged along merrily near Howrah on Friday, leaving behind a trainload of flabbergasted passengers.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes. The engine was moving ahead without us,” Dhanbad resident Lyton Halder, one of the passengers on the Howrah-bound 2340 Coalfield Express, told Metro.

Lyton, travelling in the first compartment, was thrown off his seat when the train jerked to a halt near the Tikiapara railway shed. “By the time I got up and made a dash for the door to see what had happened, the engine was some distance away and the bogies were stranded on the track,” he said recounting the scene straight out of a Tintin adventure.

An Eastern Railway spokesperson claimed that the automatic airbrakes of the engine were activated the moment the coupling snapped, but passengers said the driver didn’t stop until at least 70 metres away from the first compartment.

Another engine had to be requisitioned to take the train to its destination. The Coalfield Express entered platform number 12 of Howrah station at 12.04pm, an hour and 15 minutes behind schedule, thanks to an engine eager to reach the finishing line with a handsome lead over its bogies, Usain Bolt-style.

An electrician who was at work in the Tikiapara car shed confirmed that the runaway engine stopped not less than 70 metres from the rest of the train. “When I heard the train screech to a halt, I thought the driver may have suddenly noticed that the red signal was on. It was only when I came out of the car shed did I see the train separated from the engine and confused passengers stepping out of their compartments to find out what had happened.”

As the minutes ticked by, many of the 1,300-odd passengers got off the train with their luggage and walked along the tracks to Tikiapara station, from where they took buses and taxis to the city.

Arpan Chakraborty, a resident of Dhakuria, said he wasn’t bothered as much about the engine moving on without the rest of the train as he was about the possibility of an accident. “Anything could have happened had the train been moving at high speed.”

The train had waited for around 10 minutes at a signal and hadn’t gathered momentum when the coupling broke. A senior official of Eastern Railway said the authorities were looking at the incident as a mishap. “We are probing it,” he said.