Global Courant
BALASORE, India — Ompal Bhatia, a survivor of the three-train accident in India on Friday, was thought dead at first. When the train he was traveling in went off the rails, Mr. Bhatia was on his way to Chennai for work with three friends.
The 25-year-old had spent most of the four-hour journey on the Coromandel Express standing. Mr Bhatia, who works in the plywood trade, said that just before the trains crashed, killing nearly 300 people, some people were getting ready to sleep.
The car he was in, S3, was so full that there was only standing room left. He had held on to a chain, just like his friends.
The train is often used by day wage workers and people working as cheap labor in industries around Chennai and Bangalore. The bus Mr. Bhatia was traveling in was not air-conditioned.
The train, which travels along the hills along India’s east coast, takes more than 24 hours to complete the journey of more than 1,000 miles. Many, like Mr. Bhatia, travel the distance in crowded, standing-only compartments.
It was dusk. Some who had seats were finishing their dinner, while others were trying to rest.
Another traveler in the same train car, Mr. Moti Sheikh, 30, was also talking to a group of six other men from his village. They planned to eat and then sleep sitting on the floor because they had no seats.
Suddenly there was a loud, violent noise, Mr. Bhatia and Mr. Sheikh said, and they felt the train begin to reverse. Mr. Sheikh thought it was the sound of braking at first, but then the carriage tumbled.
“When the accident happened, we thought we were dead. When we realized we were still alive, we started making our way to the emergency counter to get off the train. The train car had gone off track and toppled to the side,” Bhatia told Reuters over the phone on Saturday.
When he and his friends got out, he said chaos reigned everywhere.
“We have seen a lot of dead people. Everyone was trying to save their life or looking for loved ones,” he said. Fortunately, he and his friends survived.
Mr Sheikh said he and his friends also thought they would not survive. “We cried when we came out,” he said, adding that help didn’t arrive until about 20 minutes later.
The Coromandel Express had gone off the track, hit a freight train parked there and then collided with a second train coming from the opposite direction.
