40 die as passenger train crashes in north India
Print Edition
AN express train plowed into a parked freight train in northern India yesterday, killing at least 40 people and reducing cars to heaps of torn and twisted metal.
The Gorakhpur Express passenger train was traveling at high speed and slammed on its brakes, but hit the train sitting on the tracks near a railway station in Uttar Pradesh.
Six of the cars on the express train derailed, with one car with unreserved seating taking the brunt of the impact and accounting for most of the 40 deaths so far counted, senior police officer Amrendra Sainger said.
“It has been reduced to a mangled iron mesh,” he said. “We do not know how many people were there.”
While the car seats 72, such trains are often filled beyond capacity.
Authorities were searching for the station master, who disappeared after the accident in Sant Kabir Nagar, about 220 kilometers southeast of the state capital Lucknow. But authorities said it was too early to say what had gone wrong and they were investigating everything from mechanical failure to human error.
Villagers were the first to reach the scene after the accident about 10 kilometers from the nearest road. Indian TV broadcast images of them helping the injured amid piles of strewn luggage.
“I was working in the field when I heard the whistle of the engine, and suddenly I heard the sound of a crash. It was a terrible sound. It still reverberates in my ears,” Ram Chander Chaudhry told news channel Samachar Plus. “Within minutes I reached there and saw the train had been derailed.”
Most of the victims were poor farm workers returning to their homes from the neighboring state of Haryana, local police official Zameer Ahmad said.
Rescuers worked to free people trapped under toppled cars and debris. The express train’s driver died later yesterday from serious injuries, while the assistant driver is in critical condition.
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