India Train Crash: Investigation Centers on Possible Signal Failure After Rescue Efforts End

At least 275 people were killed in the disaster, officials said Sunday. India's railway minister said investigators were looking at why the signaling system did not work as intended.

Sameer Yasir, Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj

Officials investigating the cause of one of the deadliest train wrecks in India's history were focusing on the possibility that a signal failure caused the disaster, after rescue efforts ended and all derailed cars were removed from the tracks on Sunday.

Two days after the crash on Friday in the eastern state of Odisha left at least 275 people dead, families of the victims were still struggling to reach the site of the wreck, near the town of Balasore, to claim the bodies of their loved ones, a journey that had been complicated by a lack of train service. The tracks were not restored until late Sunday.

Officials said the majority of the bodies remained unidentified on Sunday. The death toll was revised down from at least 288 after officials said that some victims had been counted twice.

More than 1,100 people were injured in what officials in a preliminary government report described as a "three-way accident" involving two passenger trains and an idled freight train.

The disaster cast a pall over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to modernize India's infrastructure, which he has made central to his campaign for a third term.

Here are the latest developments:

India's railway minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told reporters at the scene of the crash on Sunday that investigators were looking at why the electronic signal system used to prevent accidents did not work as intended. He said that service on the line was expected to resume by Wednesday at the latest.

Jaya Varma Sinha, an Indian Railways official, said at a news conference that a passenger train traveling at around 80 miles per hour had crashed into a freight train carrying iron ore. Within "a fraction of second," another passenger train traveling at a high speed on a separate track crossed the collision site, Mr. Sinha said.

About 200 of the people killed in the disaster remained unidentified on Sunday, doctors and officials said. Bodies were being stored at the main hospital in the state capital of Bhubaneswar, as well as in Balasore, at a small school and at a makeshift mortuary in a business park.

The disaster renewed longstanding questions about safety in a rail system that transports more than eight billion passengers a year. While India reports far fewer serious rail accidents than it did in decades past, the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other measures has been falling in recent years.

Survivors of the crash said their train was packed with hundreds of migrant laborers, students and daily wage workers who were shoulder to shoulder in at least three general compartments — with most of them standing — when the trains collided. "It was full of people," said Sayel Ali, who was admitted to a hospital near the site of the crash.

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

Mujib Mashal

Workers have managed to reopen the tracks where the disaster occurred, according to India's railway minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was overseeing the restoration. The movement of train traffic in both directions started around midnight local time, a little more than two days after the country's worst rail disaster in decades.

Alex Travelli

Over the past several years, India has been bulking up and polishing its traditionally ramshackle infrastructure like never before, and its railways have been a prime beneficiary. The government spent almost $30 billion on the country's rail system during the last fiscal year, up 15 percent from the year before.

But the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other measures has been falling — increasing the risk that India's rail system could undo the enormous strides it has made to improve safety over the past two decades.

A report last year by India's auditor general, an independent office, found that less money was being allocated for track renewal work and that officials had not even spent the full amount set aside.

The report, which examined derailments and other safety matters affecting the country's railroads during the previous four years, said that recent railway spending had been more focused on "non-priority" work.

One particular fund — intended to pay for replacement and improvement of cars, tracks and other parts of the system — underspent its budget by almost a quarter during those years, with some money diverted to other priorities, the report said.

Another fund — the Railway Safety Fund, which is supposed to benefit the entire fleet pulled by about 13,000 locomotives — had a budget of roughly $5.5 billion. That's the same amount the government spent on new locomotives and train cars, including the all-electric, semi-high-speed Vande Bharat Express, of which 15 have been built.

Projects like Vande Bharat have been showcased as a major source of national pride for politicians including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2021, he promised that there would be 75 of the new trains by Aug. 15 this year, to conclude the celebration of India's 75 years of independence.

But efforts to reduce the rate of signaling failures and derailments have attracted no such fanfare, even as India has vastly improved safety with bread-and-butter improvements like electronic signaling systems, better testing for track infrastructure and the elimination of unstaffed intersections between roads and railroad tracks.

The last time India suffered a train disaster the magnitude of Friday's derailment was 1999, when 285 people were killed in a crash in West Bengal. That came just four years after an even worse disaster that killed 358 in Uttar Pradesh.

The number of what Indian officials called "consequential train accidents" — which include derailments, collisions and fires but do not require fatalities — has dropped steadily, even as ridership in the system grew. In fiscal year 2003, there were 336 such accidents. By 2018, that number was just 59.

But the auditor general's report warned that the shifting of resources meant safety funding was "gradually being eroded."

Alex Travelli

Less than a week before India's deadliest rail disaster in decades, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before the country's gleaming new Parliament building.

The building, he said during its inauguration ceremony, would be a "symbol of aspirations, hopes and dreams" of his country in a glittering future ahead.

India has been on a spending spree under Mr. Modi's government, with its finance ministry and the World Bank hoping that private companies will follow the government's lead and pour more money into what is now the world's fifth-largest economy.

The World Bank noted in a report in April that India's rate of government spending toward long-term goals "has increased relative to the pre-pandemic level" with a particular focus on infrastructure.

Transportation, including the country's network of railroads, plays a major part in that surge in spending. The train system's budget is five times higher this year than it was when Mr. Modi took office, though spending on safety improvements has lagged.

Mr. Modi has committed to building higher-speed freight corridors between ports and India's biggest cities, to make it easier for businesses to build factories and find export markets. Other big-ticket projects, however, have less obvious benefits: A Japanese-style bullet train connecting Mumbai, the country's financial capital, to Ahmedabad, Mr. Modi's original seat of power, will do little to improve life for most of the system's 22 million daily riders, nor can its fares possibly recoup its costs.

For all the hope that the flood of public money will draw in private dollars, companies have so far been hesitant to join the rush. The rate of private investment, as a share of the economy, has been decreasing since 2012.

Even so, Auguste Tano Kouamé, the World Bank's country director for India, said his analysts expect that to change. The high rate of public spending on things like power distribution, new highways and the railroads, he said, should "crowd in" more spending by companies in pursuit of long-term gains.

Sameer Yasir

Shamik Dutta had hardly left his village before Friday, but the journey sounded worth it.

For more than two years, his friends Debpriya Pramanik and Budhadeb Das had told him about their lives working construction in Vijayawada. There were movies and trips to parks, they said. And there was money to be made, even working as day laborers.

How much, Mr. Dutta wanted to know.

"Enough for people like us," Mr. Das said. Mr. Pramanik added it would be enough for Mr. Dutta to help take care of his parents.

So after Mr. Das and Mr. Pramanik returned to their village, Baliara, in India's West Bengal state, about a month ago, Mr. Dutta resolved to go with them to Vijayawada, which is hundreds of miles away in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The three friends set off Friday from a rail station in Kolkata with a few dollars and some clothing. They stood near the door of a crowded compartment of the Coromandel Express, a key route on India's South Eastern Railway, which connects passengers from poorer eastern and central parts of India to more affluent and industrialized cities in the south.

Just before 7 p.m., Mr. Dutta needed to use the restroom and left his bags with his friends. It was the last time they saw him alive.

Moments later, their train was part of India's worst rail disaster in decades. The derailment of the Coromandel Express and two other trains, one carrying passengers and one carrying freight, killed at least 275 people.

"Suddenly, bang, bang, bang," said Mr. Das, 20. "There was a lot of light before everything went dark. It was as if the compartment was now flying in the air."

Mr. Das was knocked out. When he regained consciousness, he was in the back of a vehicle carrying more than two dozen people, many of whom were dead. Mr. Das was taken to a hospital, but his injuries were minor and he was soon released.

Mr. Das's friends were not at the hospital, so a local resident offered to drive him a half-hour back to the site of the accident on his motorcycle. By the time he arrived, it was the middle of the night and the crash site was shrouded in darkness. There were bodies everywhere, he said, and trapped survivors were still calling for help.

"I moved from one compartment searching for my friends," Mr. Das said. "After an hour I found Debpriya. When I looked at him I thought he was already dead."

But someone came and checked on Mr. Pramanik and found a pulse. "He shouted, ‘Oh this boy is alive, this boy is alive.’"

Mr. Pramanik was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where he was treated for a fractured arm and a head injury.

On Saturday, Mr. Das kept looking for Mr. Dutta. He wasn't at the hospital. On Sunday, Mr. Das left Mr. Pramanik there and traveled to a mortuary a few miles away.

It was there where he found Mr. Dutta, wrapped in a white shroud. Mr. Das did not recognize his friend's face, only the clothes he had been wearing when they boarded the train together two days earlier.

"I don't know what to tell his parents," Mr. Das said.

Alex Travelli

A report last year by India's auditor general found that less money was being allocated for track renewal work and that officials were not even spending the full amount that was being set aside. One fund — intended to pay for replacement and improvement of cars, tracks and other parts of the system — underspent its budget by almost a quarter between 2017 and 2021.

Suhasini Raj

The deadly train crash in India on Friday took place on the South Eastern Railway, a network that is crucial for millions of migrant workers who use it to travel cheaply on fast trains that cut across the country's heartland.

Many of the passengers on the network are from poorer eastern and central parts of India who find employment in the more affluent and industrialized cities in the south. By Sunday, nearly 100 trains had been canceled because of the disaster, which involved the Coromandel Express, a service that travels the 1,000-mile route between the cities of Kolkata, in the northeastern state of West Bengal, and Chennai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Officials said on Sunday that they hoped the tracks would be operational again by early this coming week. In the meantime, the Indian government has announced a special train service from the eastern state of Odisha, starting south of where the crash took place, to Chennai, stopping at all major destinations en route. The train will have a special carriage to carry the bodies of victims of the crash back to their hometowns and cities, officials said, once the dead have been identified and claimed by relatives.

The origin of the South Eastern Railway dates to 1882, fueled by a desire to provide quick transportation of grain from central India to other parts of the country to try to prevent famine. After India's independence from Britain in 1947, the country's various railway systems were reorganized geographically into zones and are today run by a body called Indian Railways, which is overseen by the federal Ministry of Railways. The South Eastern Railway division was set up in 1955 and covers busy routes across half a dozen states.

South Eastern Railway's original network covered major steel mills, as well as mines for iron ore, bauxite, manganese and coal. The division says that its routes still carry nearly 12.75 percent of the freight traffic of Indian Railways..

When a lockdown was imposed by the Indian government in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, South Eastern Railways provided 38 special trains that ferried about 45,000 stranded migrants from richer states such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu back to their homes in the states of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal.

Mujib Mashal

India's railway authority has recommended that the country's primary investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigations, take over the inquiry into what caused the train crash that resulted in the death of 275 people. While officials have zeroed in on a signal failure as the cause of the crash, they have also promised punishment and initiated a high level inquiry, suggesting that human error and sabotage have not yet been ruled out.

Sameer Yasir and Atul Loke

Families of the victims of India's worst rail disaster in two decades were on Sunday still struggling to reach the town where the disaster happened. The delays meant that many bodies remain unidentified and unclaimed, local officials and doctors said.

At least 275 people were killed in the disaster near the town of Balasore on Friday. Many of the passengers had been migrant laborers, students and daily wage workers. In and around the town in the eastern state of Odisha, the bodies of about 200 victims were still to be claimed, the officials and medics said.

Many were badly injured in the crash, making it harder to identify them, and most of the victims’ families live in towns and villages hundreds of miles away and were still trying to reach the area, they added.

The state government on Sunday moved about 100 of the unidentified victims to the morgue at the main hospital in Bhubaneswar, the state capital. About a dozen bodies remained at the hall of a small local school a few hundred yards from the disaster site, down from more than 100 on Saturday, and fewer than a dozen were still at a business park in Balasore on Sunday. The location of the others was unclear.

In the business park, the local government put up photographs of the unidentified victims, and it has also posted the images online.

The authorities had kept the bodies at the business park on top of large ice blocks and covered them with plastic sheets, but the ice was melting fast in the around 100-degree heat. Relatives who made it to the business park first had to endure the trauma of looking at the faces of victims on a laptop. Then, if they saw any resemblance to a loved one, they were taken to have a closer look.

Dr. Rahul Kumar, at Bhubaneswar's main hospital, said that the morgue there was already full.

While many of the bodies will require DNA testing for identification, he was one of several medics and officials who said that the reason for the delay in claiming the bodies was that relatives were struggling to reach the area.

"Most of these people are poor, and it may take them days to arrive either in Bhubaneswar or here in this town," Dr. Kumar said.

Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Indian railway minister, said that a special train had started to ferry family members from the city of Kolkata, in neighboring West Bengal, to Odisha. The local government in Odisha also announced the operation of a free bus service on the disrupted train route.

Karan Deep Singh

Indian officials have released new information based on a preliminary investigation into the disaster, suggesting that the trains derailed after a collision. Jaya Varma Sinha, an Indian Railways official, said at a news conference that a passenger train traveling at around 80 miles per hour had crashed into a freight train carrying iron ore.

Karan Deep Singh

Within "a fraction of second," another passenger train traveling at high speed on a separate track crossed the collision site, Sinha said. Some of its rear coaches crashed into the first passenger train, she said.

Karan Deep Singh

Sinha said that because the freight train was carrying heavy iron ore, "the whole impact" came on the first train carrying passengers. She added that "some issue" with the "signal" system was likely the overall cause of the crash, though investigations were still underway.

Alex Travelli and Karan Deep Singh

Three months ago, India's government was promoting homegrown technology intended to make its passenger trains safer. Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Indian railway minister, made a show of placing himself and the chairman of the Railway Board on two trains on a collision course to demonstrate the system, called Kavach, or armor.

The two trains sped toward each other on a single track. At a distance of 400 meters, about 440 yards, the new system applied brakes automatically — which was enough to prevent them from colliding.

But the Kavach system was not installed on the trains that crashed near Balasore, in eastern India, on Friday. Mr. Ashwini has suggested that the crash, the country's worst rail disaster in two decades, may have been caused by a signaling error, though a full investigation is underway.

Mamata Banerjee, an opposition politician, former railway minister and currently the chief minister of the state of West Bengal, from where one of the trains involved in the crash began its journey, said on Saturday that the anti-collision system could have prevented the disaster. "Had the device been on the train, this would not have happened," she told reporters.

Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi, echoed that sentiment. If it emerges that a direct collision resulted from a signaling error and not a derailment, "then something like Kavach might have been useful," he said.

On Sunday, Mr. Vaishnaw denied that Kavach could have helped, saying: "This accident is not about the collision-avoidance system." He said that he was not ready to explain why Kavach would not have prevented the crash.

Kavach has been installed on only a tiny fraction of India's approximately 10,000 trains. By the end of last year, only 77 locomotives were equipped with the system, covering about 900 miles of the total route length of more than 40,000 miles.

The program, which was started in 2012 under a previous government, makes use of onboard radio devices to communicate directly between trains.

India has been investing heavily in its train network over the past three years, having accelerated spending since the pandemic began. Most of the new initiatives that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has extolled have been aimed at improving the speed and comfort of transport along existing routes, such as the new, electric Vande Bharat trains connecting various cities and a Japanese-style bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. The government says the upgrades are part of an effort elevate the experience of riding India's railways to a world-class standard.

Spending on programs dedicated to safety improvements has been shrinking, however, as a portion of the total and even in absolute terms, according to the most recently published budgets. Dr. Mukhopadhyay mentions a particular need: "The signaling function could perhaps do with more attention. Strategically, signaling is soft-capacity addition and as we move to higher-speed trains, it will become more important."

Sameer Yasir and Anushka Patil

As the scope of Friday's railway crash in the eastern Indian state of Odisha became clearer, people from the town of Balasore and from farther afield rushed to help.

Faced with a catastrophic scene — what officials described as a "three-way accident" involving two passenger trains and a freight train — local residents drove their own cars to the site to pull passengers from the wreckage and transport them to the hospital. Some walked for hours to bring the victims food. Others began lining up to donate blood.

Hundreds of residents went to one nearby hospital and handed out packaged rice and lentils and bottles of drinking water to police officers, the injured and families searching for loved ones.

"We have distributed more than 2,000 water bottles and 250 plates of rice and cooked vegetables," said Mukesh Saha, who lives near the site of the crash. "No one should go hungry."

Doctors and medical students treating victims at another hospital, in the city of Cuttack, about 100 miles south of Balasore, were among the first to donate blood, officials in the Odisha chief minister's office reported after visiting the facility on Saturday.

Elsewhere around the state, scores of university students mobilized relief efforts for the victims, helping with rescues, delivering aid and organizing blood drives, the state's Department of Higher Education reported.

Karan Deep Singh

Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's railway minister, told reporters at the scene of the crash on Sunday that investigators were looking at why the electronic signal system used to prevent accidents did not work as intended.

Suhasini Raj

A free bus service has been announced by the Odisha government which will ferry stranded passengers from Puri and Cuttack in Odisha to Kolkata in West Bengal. The state government will use at least 50 buses until the restoration of normal train services.

Suhasini Raj

One special train is running between West Bengal and Odisha to carry victims' relatives. Officials believe that there are 100 to 200 bodies that have still not been identified. And families are having a hard time reaching hospitals, complicating efforts.

Suhasini Raj

Operators have canceled and rerouted more than 100 trains since the crash, according to railway officials. The trains serve as a lifeline for millions of migrants who travel from the poorer eastern parts of India to the industrialized south for work.

Suhasini Raj

The route partly connects the regional capitals in the south and the east, and even trains from the north eastern parts of India connect to the south via this corridor. India's railway minister has said he expects service to resume by Wednesday at the latest.

Sameer Yasir

By Sunday morning, workers had moved all the derailed coaches off the tracks. The onlookers that had cheered on rescue workers since Friday were mostly gone. Instead, family members were trickling in, some from hundreds of miles away, to identify loved ones.

Sameer Yasir

Doctors were warning that many of the bodies that had not been claimed were too disfigured to allow for normal means of identification, and that they might have to use DNA samples.

Sameer Yasir

Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's railway minister, said that the goal was to restore service on the lines by Tuesday night, Wednesday at the latest. The tracks serve passengers between the cities of Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru.

Sameer Yasir, Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar

Some initial details about the cause of the disaster were beginning to emerge hours after the crash near Balasore, India, though much remained unclear.

According to an initial government report seen by The New York Times, a high-speed passenger train traveling from Kolkata, the Coromandel Express, collided with a freight train that had been idled at a small-town station, Bahanaga Bazar, around 7 p.m. local time. The passenger train was "going at full speed across the station as it was not supposed to stop" there, the report said.

After smashing into the freight train, the passenger train, with 1,257 passengers, derailed. Twenty-one of its coaches bounced off the track, with three of them sprawled onto another track.

"Simultaneously," according to the report, a passenger train from Bengaluru to Kolkata, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express, with 1,039 passengers, was headed in the opposite direction — on the track that the three dislocated coaches lay. This second collision knocked the last two coaches of the third train off its tracks.

Officials did not yet have any explanation of why the freight train was stopped, nor why the Coromandel Express was not alerted to its presence on the tracks, which triggered the entire disaster.

Aditya Kumar Chaudhary, the chief public relations officer for Southern Eastern Railways, confirmed reports that a "preliminary inquiry" had indicated the cause was likely because of a signal failure. But Mr. Chaudhary said those initial suggestions needed to be checked in a thorough investigation.

"The train was to go for the main line, but signal pointer was given for the loop line. That is what the supervisors have pointed out," Mr. Chaudhary said. "Lots of many ifs and buts are there. It has to be checked and cross checked."

Anushka Patil

Friday's train crash in eastern India, the country's worst railway disaster in two decades, took place in the state of Odisha, known for its ancient temples and a rich tradition of music and dance.

The state also has a long maritime history. Bordering the Bay of Bengal, it was a well-known British seaport in the 17th-century. It has roughly 450 kilometers (280 miles) of coastline, making it prone to tropical cyclones, especially in October and November.

Nearly 80 percent of Odisha's population lives in rural areas, and its mineral-rich land has helped a strong industrial sector drive a rapidly growing economy, according to a state economic survey published in February.

Railway infrastructure is a critical component of the industrial sector and transports much of Odisha's coal, iron ore and other mined resources, according to the state's department of commerce and transportation. Three of India's railway zones overlap in Odisha.

Overall, railways make up a quarter of the state's transportation systems, the economic survey reported, second only to roadways. Friday's crash occurred just outside the Bahanaga Bazar station in the northeastern agricultural district of Balasore, which is several hours by car to the nearest airport in the state capital of Bhubaneswar.

The weather in Balasore was hot in the days before the crash, with daily high temperatures around 100 Fahrenheit. May is generally the hottest time of the year, and the monsoon season is expected to arrive in about two weeks.

Alex Travelli, Victoria Kim, Erin Mendell and Isabella Kwai contributed reporting.

Mike Ives and Dan Bilefsky

The train crash that killed at least 275 people, and injured hundreds more, in India is remarkable even in a country with a long history of train deaths.

In 2021 alone, there were more than 16,000 train-related deaths in India, according to the country's National Crime Records Bureau, a figure that includes cases in which people were struck while walking on tracks or fell out of moving trains.

Here is a look at some of the worst crashes in recent years.

The deadliest accident in the history of Indian rail is believed to have been in 1981, when a passenger train derailed as it was crossing a bridge in the state of Bihar. Its cars sank into the Bagmati River, killing an estimated 750 passengers; many bodies were never recovered.

In 1999, a crash in West Bengal killed about 285 people as two trains collided head-on.

In 2005, at least two dozen people were killed when a crowded passenger train slammed into a stationary cargo train in the western state of Gujarat.

Scores died when a mail train derailed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, east of New Delhi, in 2011.

In 2016, more than 100 passengers died in another Uttar Pradesh derailment.

In 2018, dozens of people were mowed down by a speeding train in the northwestern state of Punjab as they celebrated a Hindu festival with fireworks.

Anushka Patil

Scores of university students across Odisha have mobilized relief efforts after the crash, the state's department of higher education said. Doctors and medical students treating victims at the S.C.B. Medical College and Hospital in the city of Cuttack were among the first to donate blood, Odisha officials reported.

Sameer Yasir

On Saturday night, three large excavators were being used to start clearing the wreckage of derailed train coaches from the tracks. Police officers struggled to hold back a crowd of thousands who had gathered to watch, sometimes cheering as an excavator pulled apart a mangled coach and pushed it to an adjacent farm. Railroad workers installed flood lights to allow the repair of lines to start overnight, so dozens of backed-up trains can pass.

Alex Travelli, Victoria Kim, Erin Mendell and Isabella Kwai

A train crash in eastern India on Friday was the country's worst rail disaster in two decades, killing more than 270 people and renewing questions about rail safety in a country that has invested heavily in the system — relied on by millions of people every day — in recent years after a long history of deadly crashes.

Two passenger trains collided around 7 p.m. local time Friday after one of them struck a stationary freight train at full speed and derailed in the Balasore District of Odisha State, according to an initial government report. At least 275 people were killed, according to the state government on Sunday, revising an earlier death toll of 288 after an official said that some victims had been counted twice. More than 1,000 passengers were injured.

In a preliminary assessment, officials say the disaster began when the first of the two passenger trains struck the idled freight train at full speed, and then derailed. A second passenger train, heading in the opposite direction, then struck some of the dislocated cars. Officials are focusing on signal problems as the probable cause.

More than 2,200 passengers in all were onboard the passenger trains, according to railway officials, and at least 23 cars were derailed. The force of the collision left cars so mangled that rescuers used cutting equipment to reach victims.

One of the trains was a Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express train, according to South Eastern Railway. The Coromandel Express service connects the biggest cities on India's east coast at a relatively high speed. The other passenger train was a Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express train, running from a commuter hub in the southern city of Bengaluru to Kolkata, the capital of the northeastern state of West Bengal.

India's railway minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said that he had ordered an investigation into the cause and that those affected by the crash would receive compensation.

An initial government report said that the Coromandel Express passenger train derailed while traveling at full speed. Some of its cars collided with a freight train loaded with iron ore.

Derailed cars from

second passenger train

Road crossing

Coromandel Express

passenger train

Bahanaga

Severe

damage

Freight train

carrying iron ore

Bahanaga Bazar

rail station

INDIA

Site of

accident

Odisha

250 feet

Derailed cars

from second

passenger train

Bahanaga

INDIA

Odisha

Site of

accident

Road crossing

Coromandel

Express

passenger

train

Severe

damage

Bahanaga

Bazar rail

station

Freight train

carrying iron ore

250 feet

Coromandel

Express

passenger

train

Derailed cars

from second

passenger train

North

Road

crossing

Bahanaga

Severe

damage

Freight train

carrying iron ore

INDIA

Odisha

Bahanaga

Bazar rail

station

Site of

accident

Source: Approximate locations of train cars based on photographs and video from the scene.

Satellite image by Airbus.

By Lazaro Gamio, Marco Hernandez, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Karan Deep Singh

The crash occurred at the Bahanaga Bazar station near Balasore, a city near the coast in the northeastern state of Odisha. The area is known for its ancient temples and history as a 17th-century British trading post.

Balasore is several hours by car to the nearest airport, in Bhubaneswar, Odisha's capital. May is usually the hottest time of year, and daily temperatures reached about 100 degrees in the days before the crash.

The rescue operation was over by Saturday. Dozens of trains had been canceled, but crews successfully restored service in both directions late Sunday after clearing the crashed cars off the tracks. But the delays meant that families of the victims struggled to reach the crash site, and many bodies remain unclaimed, according to local officials and doctors.

Often referred to as being crucial to India's economy, the country's vast rail network is one of the world's largest, and is central to lives and livelihoods, particularly in more rural pockets. Nearly all of India's rail lines, 98 percent, were built from 1870 to 1930, according to a 2018 study published in The American Economic Review.

Derailments were once frequent in India, with an average of 475 per year from 1980 to around the turn of the century. They have become much less common, with an average of just over 50 a year in the decade leading up to 2021, according to a paper by railway officials presented at the World Congress on Disaster Management.

Rail safety more generally has improved in recent years, with the total number of serious train accidents dropping steadily to 22 in the 2020 fiscal year, from more than 300 annually two decades ago. By 2020, for two years in a row, India had recorded no passenger deaths in rail accidents — a milestone hailed by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Until 2017, more than 100 passengers were killed every year.

Even so, deadly crashes have persisted. In 2016, 14 train cars derailed in India's northeast in the middle of the night, killing more than 140 passengers and injuring 200 others. Officials at the time said a "fracture" in the tracks might have been responsible. In 2017, a late-night derailment in southern India killed at least 36 passengers and injured 40 others.

The crash on Friday was the deadliest at least since a collision in 1995 about 125 miles from Delhi that killed more than 350 people.

A main reason for the improved safety of the trains was the elimination of thousands of unsupervised railway crossings, which Mr. Modi's government said had been achieved in 2019. The relatively low-level engineering work of building underpasses and posting more signal conductors also drastically reduced crashes.

Mr. Modi has made it a priority to improve infrastructure, especially transportation systems, around the country. In recent years, the railroads, among the most visible projects for ordinary citizens, have received attention for a series of high-tech initiatives. Mr. Modi has been inaugurating electric medium-range trains and is building a Japanese-style "bullet train" corridor on the west coast to connect Mumbai with Ahmedabad.

On Saturday, though, instead of inaugurating a new train as scheduled, Mr. Modi visited the scene of the train wreck.

The train system, and especially train accidents, have long affected the fortunes of India's politicians. The cabinet position of railway minister has been one of the most sought-after posts because it is both high-profile and influential in business and industry. Suresh Prabhu, who is credited with designing New Delhi's world-class subway system, was pressed into resigning from his post in September 2017, after a series of accidents.

Within hours of Friday's disaster, some opposition politicians were already calling for the resignation of Mr. Vaishnaw.

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.