India Train Crash: 312 Dead 900 injured in Odisha's Balasore
BAHANAGA, India, June 3 (Reuters) - At least 312 people have died in India's worst rail crash in over two decades, officials said on Saturday, after a passenger train went off the tracks and hit another one in an accident a preliminary report blamed on signal failure. One train in Friday's accident also hit a freight train parked nearby in the district of Balasore in Odisha state in the east of the country, leaving a tangled mess of smashed rail cars and injuring 803. The death toll has reached 288, said K. S. Anand, chief public relations officer of the South Eastern Railway. Dead bodies are still trapped in the mangled coaches and the rescue operation is continuing, a Reuters witness said, while the death toll is expected to rise. A preliminary report indicates that the accident was the result of signal failure, Anand said. "The Coromandel Express was supposed to travel on the main line, but a signal was given for the loop line instead, and the train rammed into a goods ...