Mumbai: Poster boys caught defacing Western Railway rake

On December 14, the Railway Police Force (RPF) caught a gang of three men at Andheri station and stopped them from further defacing a new Bombardier rake with their posters.

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The RPF caught the trio red-handed

This train was then standing on platform 8 of Andheri railway station and was meant to go towards Virar. These three will now take the total number of arrests this year on the Western Railway to 300 for sticking posters inside local trains.

Sources said the RPF men were patrolling the station when they found three men moving suspiciously inside the luggage compartment of this Bombardier train. "At around 5 am we saw that the men were carrying two bundles of posters along with them," said an RPF official.

For around 20 minutes the RPF were checking whether or not they were regular commuters, before catching them. The accused are Mohammad Sakib (21), Surendra Lodhi (21) and Ajeet Singh (27). They were apprehended red-handed while trying to paste posters inside the local train.

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Sources claim that normally these posters are printed out of the state and then brought to Mumbai via long-distance trains. It has been almost three months that such an incident of poster pasting inside local trains has occurred. The officers said the men received Rs 400 each for the job.

"These people were booked under Sections 166 (b), 145 (b) and 147 of the Railway Act for defacing and trespassing," said an RPF officer. This is the first time that the Bombardier rake was being targeted by the poster boys. This year, WR has collected more than Rs 4 lakh as fine.