- By Soutik Biswas in Delhi and Adam Durbin in London
- BBC News
Jun 4, 2023 10:05 AM BST
Updated 19 minutes ago
video caption,
BBC’s Archana Shukla in Cuttack: ‘Distress and mayhem’ at the hospital treating the injured after the train wreck
India’s railways minister has suggested that a signal failure led to the Odisha rail disaster, with a “change in the electronic interlocking” being the likely cause.
Ashwini Vaishnaw later said the cause and those responsible for the deadly train crash in East India had been identified, but gave no details.
An account of India’s worst railway accident of this century follows later.
Meanwhile, the death toll has been reduced to 275 after some bodies were double counted, officials said.
Of the 1,175 injured who were hospitalized, 793 were discharged. Some families are still searching for their loved ones.
In the accident, a passenger train collided with a stationary freight train and derailed after being mistakenly directed onto a ring track alongside the main line.
Derailed wagons then crashed into the rear wagons of a second oncoming passenger train.
Speaking at a news conference on Sunday, Jaya Verma Sinha of India’s Railways Authority said both passenger trains had approached a station in Balasore district under a green signal – meaning it was safe – within seconds at the correct speed of under 130 km/h ( 81 miles per hour) approached.
She said the passenger trains should have passed each other on the main lines, but the Coromandel Express rammed into a freight train loaded with iron ore on the ring route, lifting the locomotive and some wagons over the heavy goods wagons.
The passenger train suffered all of the impact in the collision and the freight train neither derailed nor moved, she told reporters.
The Howrah Superfast Express almost went in the opposite direction, but two of its rear carriages were hit by the derailed Coromandel Express.
Ms Verma Sinha said there was “no problem with the electronic interlocking” and the investigations indicated “some kind of signal interference” rather than an outage.
“Whether it was manual, whether it was random, whether it was weather related, whether it was wear and tear, whether it was a maintenance error, all of that will be revealed after the investigation,” she added.
In railway signalling, the electronic interlocking establishes the routes for each train in a specified area, ensuring the safe movement of trains along the route.
Infrastructure expert Partha Mukhopadhyay told the BBC it should not be possible to display green signals on the main line if the line is designed for the loop.
“Signal interlocking is designed to be failsafe and this level of failure is unprecedented,” said Mr Mukhopadhyay of the Delhi-based think tank Center for Policy Research.
On Saturday Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the scene of the accident and vowed anyone found guilty would be “severely punished”.
It is believed that about 2,000 people were on board the two passenger trains – the Coromandel Express, which ran between Kolkata (formerly Kolkata) and Chennai (formerly Madras), and the Howrah Superfast Express, which ran from Yesvantpur to Howrah – when The accident occurred around 17:00 around 19:00 (13:30 GMT) on Friday.
Odisha state official Pradeep Jena told the BBC at least 187 bodies were unidentified and officials were uploading pictures of the victims to government websites and would conduct DNA testing if necessary.
Rescue work was completed on Saturday and efforts are underway to clear the debris and resume train service, officials said.
India has one of the largest train networks in the world, used by millions of passengers every day, but much of the rail infrastructure needs improvement.
Trains in India can get very crowded at this time of year as more people travel during school holidays.
The country’s worst train disaster occurred in 1981, when a crowded passenger train was thrown off the tracks into a river during a cyclone in Bihar state, killing about 800 people.