At Least 120 Dead in Indian Train Derailment on Sunday

"At least 120 people are said to have have been killed and at least 200 more injured after a train derailed near the city of Kanpur in northern India in the country’s worst train crash since 2010," reports Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai for The Guardian.

Hundreds of people were trapped after 14 carriages of the express train, travelling from Indore to Patna [operated by the government-owned Indian Railways], crumpled into one another as they came off the tracks on Sunday. 

Every day, more than 20 million Indians use the country’s heaving, out of date and poorly maintained railway system, the fourth largest in the world. Accidents on Indian trains are common and claim more than 25,000 lives a year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau [PDF]. 

[Correspondent's note: In "passengers carried in rail transport per year", it is ranked third, behind China and Japan, per Wikipedia.]

A document sent to the Guardian by Anil Saxena, a railways spokesman, said derailments were often caused by “poor maintenance of infrastructure especially at stations and failure to take appropriate precautionary measures against flash floods, landslides, boulder[s] falling, etc."

The Commission of Railway Safety "will look into the possibility of a fracture in the tracks as a possible cause of the accident, which led to the coaches to not only go off the rails but pile up, leading to high casualties," report Ramendra Singh and Avishek G Dastidar for The Indian EXPRESS. "Derailment is the cause of 50 per cent of all accidents in the Indian Railways."

Dastidar also reports in a subsequent article in The Indian EXPRESS that 695 passengers were on the train. The article focuses on travel insurance, indicating that the derailment "will be the first real test of the recently-launched optional travel insurance scheme for train passengers."

In a third article on the derailment, he reports that outdated coaches used on the Indore-Patna Express contributed to the high casualties on the train.

Hat tip to Emma Bowman of NPR.