THANE:It was a day of tragedies on the Thane-Dombivli-Airoli suburban rail route as seven commuters died in seven hours in separate incidents on Sunday morning.The first death was reported at 6am when a man was run over by a Down slow line between Thane and Mulund. The man is yet to be identified. Just as helpers located the body and brought it to the platform, the news of another death was radioed around 8am.A 50-year-old injured commuter was reported lying lifeless between Thane and Airoli, presumably hit by a suburban local. Around 9am, barely a few metres from the spot where the second body was found, a 20-year-old resident of Vitawa, Rahul Chauhan, was hit by a train as he was walking along the tracks towards Thane station.Passersby managed to halt an oncoming train and loaded the injured Chauhan into it. He was rushed to Thane Civil Hospital, where doctors declared him brought dead. His friends said that Chauhan, who worked as a labourer, had arrived in the city on Friday from Nashik and was on his way to his first day at work in Thane.“Chauhan was staying with relatives and was walking with a fellow labourer. His friend managed to evade the train but Chauhan got hit,” said a railway police official.In the fourth incident, Akesh Padyal (44), who was travelling from Ghatkopar to Nalasopara via Thane, was found lying in the gap between the platform and tracks around 11am at the Mumbai-end of platform 5 in Thane.Police officials said the commuter may have tried to alight a running train and is likely to have lost his balance before slipping into the gap. Padyal stayed in Dombivli and is survived by his wife, a child, his parents and two brothers.He was employed with a private firm in Dombivli and his family said they didn’t know why he had gone to Ghatkopar and then returned to Thane. In Kopar, a 26-year-old woman, Priti Rane, her two-year-old son Livesh and a relative, Sunita Bangale, died after getting stuck between an Express train and a local while crossing the tracks at Kopar in the afternoon.Priti and her son lived in Kalyan and they were retuning with Bangale after attending a family function in Kopar. Accidental death reports were filed in all cases by Thane railway police. GRP data shows that 2,981 people died on the 700-km suburban network in Mumbai in 2018. The figure was a slight improvement from 2017’s 3,014.(With inputs from Pradeep Gupta)

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