KOLKATA (AFP) – One of the train services involved in a triple collision in India’s deadliest railway disaster in decades resumed yesterday, as officials revised the death toll up to 288.
“The Coromandal Express is back on track,” railway spokesman Aditya Kumar Chaudhary told reporters, with the train departing Shalimar station near Kolkata yesterday afternoon on a 25-hour journey south to Chennai. The service was one of three trains involved in the crash near Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha last Friday.
Odisha’s chief secretary Pradeep Jena said late on Tuesday the official death toll had risen to 288, up from an earlier official total of 275.
At least 1,175 people were injured, many of them in critical condition and still being treated in hospital. Jena said the revised toll came after deaths were tallied from both hospitals and mortuaries and noted that 83 bodies remain unidentified.
Medical centres were overwhelmed by the number of casualties and there are fears the death toll could rise further.
The Coromandal Express was diverted onto a loop line when it then slammed into a stationary goods train. The collision flipped the carriages of the Coromandal Express onto another track. The derailed compartments then struck the rear carriages of another train, the Howrah Superfast Express from India’s tech hub Bengaluru, which was passing in the opposite direction.
While trains began operating late Sunday past the crash site, yesterday’s journey wwas the first service of the Coromandal Express to resume the route.
