(The Associated Press circulated the following article on December 14.)
NEW DELHI, India — Two passenger trains collided head-on on a stretch of rural track in northern India on Tuesday, killing at least 27 people and injuring 36, officials said.
Many of the injured were in critical condition and were battling to survive at an army hospital, said railway spokesman Devender Sandhu.
A “communications snag” between two stations masters apparently caused the crash, with an express train and a local train allowed to travel on the same track toward one another, said Dharam Singh, the top railway official in the area where the accident occurred.
“We will order an inquiry. Only then will we come to know who was at fault,” Singh said in a telephone interview.
The accident occurred in a rural area south of the village of Mirthal, between the cities of Pathankot and Jalandhar in India’s northern Punjab province, about 180 miles northwest of New Delhi.
The express train was traveling from Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir, to Ahmadabad in western Gujarat state. The local train was traveling between Jalandhar and Pathankot.
Soldiers from an army base in Pathankot had rushed to the scene to help railway officials, police and local villagers in the rescue operation, Sandhu said.
He said three coaches on one train and two on the other had been thrown from the tracks, and it would take at least a day to clear them off.
Shortly after the accident, passengers’ relatives were jamming stations along the train routes, pleading for information.
In the western city of Ahmadabad, the destination of the express train, dozens of weeping people were waiting for word at the station.
“They are not even telling us which compartments got damaged in the accident and only saying that information from Punjab would come at any moment,” said Bipul Shah, a government employee whose parents were traveling on the train.
Railway accidents are fairly frequent on India’s state-run system, which operates 7,000 passenger trains a day.
The sprawling Indian rail network is 67,000 miles long and is the world’s second largest after China’s.