At Least 300 Killed, 400 Hurt as 2 Trains Crash in India : Accident: One had stopped on the tracks after hitting a cow. Rail disaster is one of worst in nation’s history.

At least 300 people were killed and 400 others were injured Sunday when a passenger train rammed another train that had stopped suddenly after hitting a cow, news agencies reported.

Rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the twisted debris today and expected the death toll to rise. Cranes were being used to lift the smashed cars, which had telescoped into each other.

“Every time we pick something up, there’s a body underneath it,” said M.N. Chopra, the railroad’s divisional manager.

“The entire area was reverberating with cries and shrieks,” said Manas Patnaik, who was traveling from the eastern state of Orissa to New Delhi.

“I stumbled several times on severed limbs and some people--I don’t know whether they were sleeping or dead,” Patnaik, 29, told the United News of India press agency.

The accident, one of India’s worst rail disasters, occurred outside Firozabad railway station, about 135 miles southeast of New Delhi. A signalman sent the Puroshottam Express onto a track without realizing that the Kalindi Express had stopped ahead, the Press Trust of India news agency said, quoting unnamed railroad officials.

The three rear cars of the Kalindi Express and the engine and first two cars of the other train crumpled like balls of paper, the agency said.

Railway officials said most of the 2,200 passengers aboard the two trains were sleeping when the wreck occurred. Both trains were bound for New Delhi.

Among the dead were 22 teen-age athletes returning from a training camp and dozens of soldiers traveling with their regiments.

The injured were admitted to hospitals in Firozabad and in the nearby towns of Tundla and Agra.

In New Delhi, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao expressed sorrow over the deaths and directed a senior government minister to supervise rescue operations.

Hundreds of people have been killed this year in six separate railroad accidents in India, where trains are the most common form of transportation. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people crowd the 7,000 trains that crisscross this sprawling nation.

Sunday’s crash was one of the worst train accidents in the Indian railroad’s 142-year history. At least 270 people were killed when a train plunged into a river in 1981.