36 Die in India When Train Strikes Derailed Freight Cars

At least 36 people were killed and 150 injured when a passenger train struck derailed freight cars in dense fog early Saturday, a senior police official said.

Railroad workers with blowtorches fought to reach screaming passengers trapped in the crumpled wreckage.

Cars from the freight train had derailed and fallen onto an adjacent track at Sarai Banjara station, said Baldev Singh, an official at the railroad police station. Just five minutes later, the passenger train came rushing through this rural town in Punjab state.

Four coaches of the passenger train were smashed and overturned in the wreck, trapping more than 200 passengers.

“When I reached the site, what I saw was horrific. People, many of them cut and bleeding, were screaming from the overturned wagons where they were trapped,” Singh said.

Villagers who heard the crash rushed to the tracks with lanterns and helped pull scores of people from the wreck. They comforted survivors with tea and blankets.

The injured included 45 in critical condition, and the death toll was expected to rise, Singh said, quoting doctors. Most of the injured were taken to nearby hospitals, but 10 were transferred to a hospital in the Punjab capital, Chandigarh.

The passenger train was heading from Ludhiana to Ambala, 125 miles north of New Delhi, when the accident occurred at 5:30 a.m. As the passenger train approached Sarai Banjara at 50 mph, one of part of the freight train uncoupled and four cars fell onto the passenger train’s track, railroad officials said.

The two trains were in touch by radio, and when the passenger train’s driver heard about the derailment, he tried to stop, said Shanti Narain, a member of the Indian railroad authority who visited the accident site.

“But there was barely a minute before his engine hit the wagons,” Narain said.

In the fog that often shrouds northern India at the onset of winter, visibility is reduced to a few yards, police said.