Odisha train accident: The collision occurred at about 7pm on Friday
New Delhi:
Over 260 people were killed and nearly 900 injured in a horrific accident that involved two passenger trains and a goods train in Odisha, officials said Saturday, the country’s deadliest rail accident in recent years.
Here are the top 10 updates on this big story:
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi has left for Odisha where he will visit the train accident site in Balasore district, about 170 km north of Bhubaneswar, and meet with injured people at hospitals in Cuttack, sources have said.
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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is also on a visit to the state to take stock of the situation and meet the injured in hospitals. Her Odisha counterpart Naveen Patnaik also visited Balasore this morning and reviewed the situation with Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
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The rescue operation in the horrific train accident has been completed and the restoration work has been started, railways spokesperson Amitabh Sharma said this afternoon, about 18 hours after the horrific collission.
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The collision occurred at about 7pm on Friday when the Howrah Superfast Express, running from Bangalore to Howrah derailed and became entangled with the Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata to Chennai, railway officials said.
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The crash saw one train ram so hard into the other that carriages were lifted high into the air, twisting and then smashing off the tracks. Another carriage had been tossed entirely onto its roof, crushing the passenger section. Over 3,400 passengers were travelling in two trains, according to railway officials.
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“Everything was shaking and we could feel the coach toppling,” Sanjay Mukhia, a daily wage worker travelling to Chennai on the Coromandel-Shalimar Express, told NDTV, showing his injuries. According to another survivor, severed limbs were scattered over the ripped metal wreckage.
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The Railways Ministry has ordered a high-level probe into how the accident happened. The ministry has also announced compensation of ₹ 10 lakh for the families of those who have died, ₹ 2 lakh for those seriously injured. PM Modi has also announced a compensation of ₹ 2 lakh for the family of the dead and ₹ 50,000 for the injured from the PM’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF).
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48 trains have been cancelled, 39 diverted and 10 trains have been short terminated due to the accident, which happened on the Howrah-Chennai main line in the Kharagpur division of the South Eastern Railway.
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India has one of the world’s largest rail networks and has seen several disasters over the years, the worst of them in 1981 when a train derailed while crossing a bridge in Bihar and plunged into the river below, killing between 800 and 1,000 people.
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Odisha train accident ranks as its third worst, and the deadliest since 1995, when two express trains collided in Firozabad, near Agra, killing more than 300 people.
