‘Some 10 to 15 people fell over me … when I got out, I saw limbs scattered all around’
The carriages from three separate trains sat piled high in an entangled wreck. Some lay sideways, others had been thrown so high into the air on impact that they had fallen back to earth twisted and upside down.
Nearby, a line of dozens bodies covered in white sheets were laid out next to the wreckage waiting for vehicles – ambulances, local cars, even tractors – to take them away on stretchers to local hospitals. Possessions of the passengers lay scattered around them, shoes and toys and suitcases thrown open.
This was the aftermath of one of the deadliest train crashes in India in almost two decades, when on Friday evening the Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata in West Bengal to Chennai in Tamil Nadu, collided with a freight train in the eastern state of Odisha. The freight train in turn derailed some carriages of the Howrah Superfast Express train, which was running in the opposite direction.
