At least 11 people have been killed and about 50 were injured in a collision between two passenger trains in India’s Andhra Pradesh state.
The railway ministry said in a statement that two coaches of one of the trains carrying passengers were derailed and a preliminary investigation found that ‘human error’ had led to the collision, caused by ‘overshooting of signa’ by the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train between Alamanda and Kantakapalle.
The accident occurred when the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train stopped due to a break in an overhead cable and the oncoming train, a Visakhapatnam-Palasa Express service, rammed into it, derailing carriages of the stationary train, a senior railways official said.
After the incident, as many as 12 trains have been canceled, and 15 have been diverted, while seven others have been partially cancelled. The accident comes just months after India’s state-run railways suffered their worst train crash in two decades when 292 people were killed. In that accident, a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped off the tracks and hit another passenger train coming from the opposite direction.
