More than 260 people were killed and hundreds more injured when a passenger train derailed and struck two other trains in eastern India on Friday, officials said.
The death and injury toll was exceptionally high even by the standards of a nation with a long history of deadly crashes.
The crash, in the state of Odisha, shocked India, now the world’s most populous country, and renewed longstanding questions about safety problems in a system that transports more than eight billion passengers a year. The country has invested heavily in the system in recent years, but that has not been enough to overcome decades of neglect.
Teams of rescue workers with dogs and cutting equipment were working to free injured people trapped in the wreckage of twisted train carriages. Officials said that 115 ambulances had been mobilized and that all nearby hospitals were on standby.
The government in the state, home to about 45 million people, declared a day of mourning after India’s worst rail disaster in two decades. Dozens of trains were canceled. Teams from the Army, Air Force and National Disaster Response Force were mobilized to help. And people near the site of the crash were lining up to donate blood.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised “all possible assistance” for the victims and offered his condolences. A senior official confirmed that Mr. Modi was likely to visit the site of the disaster on Saturday.
“In this hour of grief, my thoughts are with the bereaved families,” Mr. Modi wrote on Twitter. “May the injured recover soon.”
The crash occurred when several cars of a train derailed and collided with a second one in Balasore District, the train’s operator, South Eastern Railway, said in a statement. Local officials said the tangle ultimately involved a third train carrying goods.
Some of the passengers were heading back to the eastern state of West Bengal from information technology or nursing jobs in southern India, The Indian Express newspaper reported. Others were day laborers.
Ashok Samal, a shopkeeper, told The Hindustan Times that he was ending his day near the railway in his village of Bahanaga on Friday when he heard a deafening noise, ran to the track on the main line between Kolkata and Chennai, and saw a pile of mangled train cars.
“There were loud shrieks and blood all over,” he told the newspaper, adding that he saw people trapped under coaches and people wailing for help.
