Families in desperate hunt for loved ones as India’s deadly rail crash wreckage cleared

Rescue workers wound up the task of clearing mangled wreckage on Sunday after India’s deadliest rail crash in more than two decades, as many families said they remained in the dark over what happened to missing loved ones.

Signal failure has been identified as the probable cause of the accident in which 275 people died and nearly 1,200 people were injured.

Officials said the derailment on Friday, near Balasore in Odisha state in the east of the country, was caused by an error in the electronic signalling system that led a passenger train travelling at full speed to wrongly change tracks and hit a freight train.

It then flipped onto another track and hit a second passenger train travelling in the opposite direction.

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Witnesses described “horrific and heart-wrenching” scenes involving the dead and wounded.

The death toll was revised down from an initial 300, after it was found that some bodies had been counted twice. Authorities said the tally was unlikely to rise, as the rescue operation was complete.

In a hospital in nearby Soro, overwhelmed doctors and nurses worked round the clock to treat the injured, while dogs were taken into the wreckage to help search for bodies and survivors.

More than 900 people had been discharged from hospital while 260 were still being treated, with one patient in a critical condition, the Odisha state government said.

In nearby Cuttack city, Mukesh Kumar said he had not heard from his brother Amresh since the crash and he no longer had much hope that he survived. He fears his brother’s body might be “dumped somewhere” unidentified.

“They were a group of friends. We looked everywhere and found one of them in one of the hospitals,” he said.

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Other people travelled for hours to reach the area to seek news of loved ones.

At a helpdesk outside SCB Medical College and Hospital, people were desperately enquiring after missing relatives, but there was little information for most.

Top railway official Jaya Verma Sinha said early investigations showed that a signal was given to the Coromandel Express to run on the main track line, but the signal later changed, and the passenger train instead entered a loop line where it rammed into a freight train loaded with iron ore.

As the Coromandel Express’s coaches hit another track, they caused the incoming Yesvantpur-Howrah Express also to derail.

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The passenger trains, carrying 2,296 people in all, were not overspeeding, she said, and a detailed investigation would reveal whether the error was human or technical.

Footage from the aftermath showed rescuers climbing up one of the mangled trains to find survivors, while passengers called for help and sobbed beside the wreckage.

The Coromandel Express, which travels past the hills along India’s eastern coast, normally takes more than 24 hours to complete its journey of nearly 1,600km (1,000 miles).

Most of the victims of the crash were migrant labourers, many of them from West Bengal, who often take the overcrowded train.

On Sunday, a few shattered, overturned carriages, were the only visible remnants of the tragedy. Under the sun’s glare, workers laid cement to fix the tracks.