Express Mail Train Derails in India

[Bob Dylan]

According to Yahoo News an Express Mail Train from Howrah in East India to Kalka derailed killing @ least 30+ people and hundreds injured. The 12 Coach Train is being searched car by car for survivors/bodies and the death toll is expected to rise!

The Rail Ministry has announced that families of the dead will receive 500,000 Repees ($11,000) for their pain and loss. Perhaps jis can provide clarification if this is standard or whether law suits are allowed in India in instances like this?

Hopefully the death and injured toll wont rise too much and the crew (didnt say how many in the story) are also OK???

 

[jis]

Here is a series of TV news reports about it:

http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/166410/kalka-express-derails-in-up-25-injured.html

The train that derailed is 12311 Howrah Delhi Kalka Mail. The derailment was at Malwan between Allahabad and Kanpur. 13 cars and the single AC Electric locomotive (WAP-7 class) derailed. According to latest reports 35 are known to have died and over a hundred are injured. By Indian standards they were able to get the emergency team to the accident site pretty fast apparently. Usually these things turn out to be way more chaotic than they need to be somehow, and some of that is evident in the news reports in that video linked to above.

Typically these derailments are exacerbated by the absence of tight lock coupler, which cause the train to come apart and cars scatter helter skelter causing more damage than would be the case if there were tight lock couplers to keep the train together. This was an air-braked consist but with chain-link couplers.

In India railways as well as airlines make an ex-gratia payment of a standard amount to those injured and the next of kin who die. There are no restrictions on suing but the way the legal system works in India, there may be some chance the the grand-children might actually collect anything from such cases. So very few people actually go that route.

 

[jis]

Here's another one which took place within hours of the Kalka mail derailment, but this one was a terrorist attack with an IED in Assam....

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/assam-puriguwahati-express-derailed-50-injured/166457-3.html

 

[jis]

Kalka Mail death toll is upto 69, most being from car S2 (a second class sleeper), which pretty much got demolished by getting hit from the side by two other cars. Injuries are around 300. According to various reports 13 to 15 of the 24 cars in the train derailed. The train was carrying over 1200 passengers when the accident occurred. They have no way of knowing exactly how many since it carries so called General Second Class, which is unreserved accommodation. One of the air-conditioned coaches turned completely upside down, but integrity was not lost fortunately. It is really weird that there is so little damage to the track in all this!

Incidentally Kalka Mail predates the creation of Indian Railways after nationalization. It was introduced by the East Indian Railway during the British Raj, mainly to carry folks from Calcutta and Delhi to the hill station of Simla, which is reached from Kalka by the narrow gauge (2'6") Kalka - Simla Railway, which is now a UNICEF Heritage site just like its eastern cousin, the 2' gauge Darjeeling Himalayan which connects New Jalpaiguri to Darjeeling, another hill station and for a while the summer capital of India. It is of the same genre as the Bombay Central - Peshawar Cantt Frontier Mail, which in its truncated form Mumbai Central - Amritsar) is now called the Golden Temple Mail.

And no, nothwithstanding what every newspaper report seems to be saying, Kalka mail does not go to New Delhi. It goes through Delhi Junction and bypasses New Delhi on its way to Kalka. When it was introduced New Delhi was an itsy-bitsy little station which was not easily reachable from Calcutta, and its route has remained pretty much the same since its introduction, so no New Delhi.