More Than 200 Feared Dead In Indian Train Crash

By Himangshu Watts

GAISAL, India (Reuters) - Two crowded trains collided head-on at a railway station in eastern India a few hours before dawn Monday, killing at least 175 people and injuring 310.

Officials said they expected the death toll to rise sharply as more bodies were cut out of the mangled wreckage of the train engines and 13 of their carriages.

Earlier reports had suggested that there was a bomb blast at Gaisal station, 315 miles north of the West Bengal state capital Calcutta.

But local District Magistrate Prashant told Reuters that signal failure was now being blamed for India's most deadly train disaster in four years.

The worst rail disaster of all time also occurred in India, in 1981, when a cyclone blew a train off the tracks into a river into the northern state of Bihar, killing more than 800 people.

The collision between the Awadh-Assam Express, bound for Guwahati in the northeastern state of Assam, and the Delhi-bound Brahmaputra Mail occurred at 1:55 a.m.

Six carriages of one train tore into seven of the other, leaving a trail of passengers, metal, glass, suitcases, shoes and bedrolls. More than 100 bodies, covered in white sheets, lay side-by-side on the platform.

Prashant said he expected the toll to rise to 230.

But doctors and a group of about 25 local medical students who had been working flat out since 4:00 a.m. said they feared hundreds more would be found in second-class carriages, which are often crammed with more than 70 people each. At least two carriages still had bodies inside, they said.

The Press Trust of India said more than 500 were feared dead.

Officials said the victims aboard the Brahmaputra Mail were mostly soldiers and Border Security Force and Central Reserve Police Force personnel.

``It was like a nightmare. It was completely dark and it sounded like a very loud explosion,'' said Nayak Lakhi Bora, one of the soldiers who survived the accident with injuries.

He pointed to the carriage in which he had been travelling, which appeared to have flown upwards on the impact and then crushed a carriage of the other train as it came down. ``I don't remember how I came down,'' said Bora.

Another injured passenger, Umesh Kumar, waited for news of his family of six. His brother and his mother were among four already confirmed dead -- his father and sister were still missing.

Thousands of worried people thronged stations in Assam to find out the fate of friends and relatives. The government issued phone numbers for information control rooms set up at 10 stations stretching from Delhi to the east of the country.

Movement of tea, petroleum products and minerals from the northeastern region were expected to be hit by the accident, which compounded problems caused by the bombing of a rail track in the area by Assamese separatist guerrillas Saturday.

``The series of disruptions on the main track will severely affect movement of tea, petroleum oil and lubricants, coal, dolomite and gypsum from the region to the other parts of the country,'' a railway official said.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which rules the state of West Bengal, called on Federal Railway Minister Nitish Kumar to resign and for spending on rail development to be made a key issue in the September-October general elections.

India's rail network is the second largest in the world after China's and carries some 13 million passengers every day.

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