India vows punishment for those responsible for deadly train crash

Shattered railcars were cleared and tangled tracks straightened and rejoined as workers worked hard on Sunday to quickly restore a key railway line in eastern India, two days after the country’s disaster. worst train disaster in decades.

Families of the victims were still struggling to reach the wreck site near the town of Balasore in Odisha state. Officials stepped up investigations into the cause of the crash, saying that while they were investigating the malfunction of an electronic signaling system, they were not ruling out human error – or even sabotage.

The desperate journey to reclaim the bodies of loved ones was made difficult for many families by a lack of train service, although some train traffic began late Sunday evening in both directions on repaired tracks. Officials said a special train would carry family members from the city of Kolkata, in the neighboring state of West Bengal, to Odisha. And the government of Odisha announced a free bus service on the disrupted train route.

“Most of these people are poor and it can take days for them to arrive,” said Rahul Kumar, a doctor at the main hospital in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, who helped with the rescue and relief efforts.

Information about the cause of the triple accident has been piece by piece. What is known so far: A high-speed train collided with a parked freight train at around 7 p.m. on Friday and derailed. Some of its cars crashed into another passenger train, leaving a vast scene of twisted metal, shattered limbs, and splattered blood.

India’s rail network is one of the largest in the world, carrying eight billion passengers a year. The disaster cast a shadow over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to modernize the country’s infrastructure, which he has put at the center of his campaign for a third term. Mr Modi’s government has regularly published its investments in infrastructure expansion, but a recent official audit pointed to a glaring imbalance in budgets.

While India dramatically increased overall spending, including on a fleet of new semi-high-speed trains, the amount it has invested in safety for the rest of its fleet of more than 13,000 trains fell, the audit said.

India’s Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters on Sunday that officials were investigating whether the electronic signal system to prevent accidents had not functioned as intended. But officials left open the possibility of sabotage and promised punishment for anyone found responsible. Railway authorities have also asked India’s main investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, to take over the investigation, the minister said.

Railroad officials privately grumbled that by launching a high-profile investigation, political leaders were looking for scapegoats to divert attention from what has been a well-documented truth: , work to ensure safety on the country’s vast rail network remains grossly underfunded .

For the families who traveled to the crash site, the process of identifying and claiming their loved ones was slow and traumatic. Of the 275 people killed in the crash (officials initially said 288 had died, but later revised the toll), only 88 bodies had been returned to their families since the crash, officials said. More than 1,100 others were injured.

The government in Odisha on Sunday moved about 100 bodies to the morgue of the ain hospital in Bhubaneswar, and it was full. The state government also posted online photosM of more than 160 dead, many in abysmal condition, to help families identify victims.

About a dozen bodies were also laid out in the hallway of a small school a few hundred meters from the crash site. Others were held in a business park in Balasore atop large blocks of ice covered with plastic sheeting. But the ice melted quickly in the heat. Families who reached the park first had to view the faces of the victims on a laptop. Then, if they saw any resemblance to a loved one, they would go in to take a closer look.

Passengers on the Coromandel Express, one of the trains, included two friends, Debpriya Pramanik and Budhadeb Das, who were returning from their West Bengal village of Baliara to their construction work in the southern city of Vijayawada. They had persuaded a third friend, Shamik Dutta, to join them.

Mr. Dutta had barely left Baliara, but his two friends said they convinced him that the money they could earn in Vijayawada was worth it.

How many? Mr. Dutta wanted to know.

“Enough for people like us,” Mr. Badger told him. Mr. Pramanik added that with the money Mr. Dutta could help take care of his parents.

On the Coromandel Express, the three friends stood at the door of a crowded compartment, where people sat shoulder to shoulder. Just before 7pm on Friday, Mr. Dutta said he had to go to the toilet and left his bags with his friends.

It was the last time they saw him alive.

Interviews with three railway officials and press briefings by other officials provided insight into the moments leading up to the crash.

The Coromandel Express had departed Kolkata with about 1,250 passengers and passed through Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, traveling at about 80 miles per hour; it could not stop there. At the same time, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express, carrying 1,039 passengers, left the station and headed in the opposite direction.

At 6:55 p.m., the Coromandel suddenly swerved on a looping track where a freight train carrying heavy iron ore was parked. When the first train collided with the freight train, nearly 20 of the passenger cars derailed – some slammed into a farmhouse on the other side and others hit the tail of the second passenger train.

Two senior railway officials, speaking to reporters in Delhi, said they had firmly established several factors: the Coromandel had received a green signal when it reached Bahanaga Bazar station, the train was not speeding and had not run through a red signal .

The tracks are managed by an “interlocking system,” they said, which determines which signal — green to pass, yellow to slow down, red to stop — would be given to a train. While interlock systems can be controlled manually or electrically, officials determined that the one at the station was electronic.

“It’s called a fail-safe system, which means it’s failing on the safer side,” Sandeep Mathur, one of two railway officials responsible for railway signalling, told reporters.

Researchers studied why the loop remained open and whether an extra layer of human oversight had failed. The behavior of officers at the signal box, a stone’s throw from the crash site, as well as managers at Bahananga station about 500 meters away, were also under investigation, the officials said.

The crash occurred on the South Eastern Railway, a vital network for millions of migrant workers who travel cheaply on fast trains that run across India’s interior. Many of the passengers – such as Mr Das, Mr Pramanik and Mr Dutta – came from the poorer eastern and central parts of India and worked in the more affluent cities in the south.

During the crash, Mr. Das was knocked out and suffered minor injuries. Mr. Pramanik emerged with a broken arm and a head injury. Mr. Das said he kept looking for Mr. Dutta, but he was not at the hospital where Mr. Pramanik was being treated, so he traveled to a morgue a few miles away.

There he found Mr. Dutta’s body wrapped in a white sheet.

Mr Das said he didn’t recognize his friend’s face, only the clothes he was wearing when they boarded the train.

“I don’t know what to tell his parents,” Mr. Badger said.

Atul Loki, Karan Deep Singh And Alex Travelli reporting contributed.