Guwahati/Agartala, June 15 (IANS): In view of the heavy rain and the red alert sounded by the meteorological department for the next two days in the Lumding-Badarpur Hill section, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) on Saturday cancelled eight express trains between Silchar and other cities of Assam for Sunday.

A NFR spokesman said that the authorities have yet to cancel all the trains in the Lumding-Badarpur Hill section, which is a connecting railway route to south Assam, Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram.

“Depending on the intensity of the rains and condition of the railway tracks, we would decide on the running of the trains Monday onwards,” the spokesman told IANS over phone from the NFR headquarters in Guwahati.

He said that as a precautionary measure, the authorities have cancelled and rescheduled some trains passing through this section.

The Met department said that due to cyclonic circulations, Assam and other northeastern states are set to receive heavy rain in the next few days.

Heavy rain accompanied by thunderstorms has been lashing various places in Assam including the southern part of the state since Friday night.

Train services have been cut off between Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, southern Assam and the rest of the country for the last few weeks as most railway tracks remained waterlogged and damaged owing to the landslides in the Lumding Division of the NFR because of the incessant rain before and after Cyclone Remal.

Every year during the monsoon, several northeastern states, especially Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur and southern Assam, remain cut off from the rest of the country for weeks owing to landslides, waterlogging and damage to railway tracks, leading to hardship for the people of the region.