Deadly India rail crash caused by faulty signal connections made during repair
(VOVWORLD) - Workers repairing a rail-road barrier in India made faulty connections in the automated signalling system on the network, leading to the country's worst rail disaster in two decades, an official probe has found.
 288 people are killed and more than 1,000 injured in the rail crash at Bahanaga Bazar station in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on June 2, 2023. (Photo: AFP/VNA) |
The June 2 crash in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, killed 288 people and injured more than 1,000.
The disaster struck when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped off the tracks and hit another passenger train coming from the opposite direction.
In the probe report, the Commission of Railway Safety (CRS) investigators said local railway staff did not have a standard circuit diagram which led to a faulty connection in the signalling system when they tried to take the boom-barrier circuit offline for repair, it said. The malfunctioning system directed the passenger train onto the path of the freight train.