At least 4 dead, 50 injured after passenger train derails in India

A train derailed in eastern India Wednesday night, killing at least four people and injuring 50 other passengers, a government official and news reports said.

Six of the 23 coaches of the North-East Express train, on its way to Assam state from New Delhi, derailed near Raghunathpur railroad station in Buxar district of Bihar state.

The Press Trust of India news agency cited police officer Manish Kumar as saying that four people died in the accident.

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The injured were rushed to hospital and rescue work was in progress though hampered by darkness, Kumar told reporters.

Medical teams with ambulances rushed to the scene and hospitals were alerted to receive injured passengers, another police officer, Deepak Kumar, said.

D.K. Pathak, a railroad official who was on the train at the time of the accident, said most injuries were reported from one of the derailed coaches.

Other details were not immediately available.

In June, India had one of the country’s deadliest rail crashes involving two passenger trains that killed more than 280 people and injured 900 others. A malfunction with the signal system was found to have caused the accident.

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Most train accidents in India are blamed on human error or outdated signaling equipment.

In August 1995, two trains collided near New Delhi, killing 358 people in one of the worst train accidents in the country.

In 2016, a passenger train slid off the tracks between the cities of Indore and Patna, killing 146 people.

More than 12 million people ride 14,000 trains daily across India, traveling on 40,000 miles of track.