A An error in the labeling of the cables tasked with controlling the rails’ automatic signaling system has resulted in the worst train crash of the 21st century. Indiaalmost finished last month 290 dead and a thousand injured.
This negligence committed by the personnel of the signaling and telecommunication department in 2015, not corrected in subsequent years According to the Railway Safety Commission’s (CRS) accident report compiled by the Indian Express newspaper, the maintenance work carried out on the track hours before the accident caused confusion. As a result, the first of the passenger trains involved in the accident entered a line occupied by a parked freight train where it collided and derailed. At that time, another passenger train passing through the station collided with the two of them.
The incident occurred in the eastern state of Odisha on June 2 and It cost the lives of around 290 people, in addition to leaving more than a thousand injured.making it India’s worst rail accident of the 21st century. The fault in the wiring showed workers at the nearby Bahanaga Bazar station that the first passenger train would continue to run on an empty road instead of switching to a line used by the freight railroad.
The report highlighted the chain of errors that led to this conclusion, from the initial decision in 2015 to the non-correcting follow-up review, with special emphasis on 2018. technicians changed the system without noticing the error. In this sense, the report discovered that the same error occurred two weeks before the accident on another railway section in India, but in this case it managed to be fixed in a timely manner.
The Indian rail network has undergone major modernization in recent years with the development of new stations, semi-high-speed trains and new technologies to try to reduce the high accident rate.
In 2021 alone, India recorded 17,993 rail crashes that resulted in 16,431 deaths and 1,852 injuries., according to the latest report from the National Criminal Records Office. With a route of 68,000 kilometers, it is fourth in the world after the United States, Russia and China, with 21,650 trains and 7,349 stations across the country and transports approximately 23 million passengers per day.