On Friday evening, June 2, the Coromandel Express carrying about 1250 passengers was traveling through a stretch of track just southwest of Balasore, about 130 miles southwest of Kolkata, India. A freight train full of heavy iron ore was parked on a siding that paralleled the main line. Somehow, the express train was signaled to travel past the siding, but the actual switch over which the train passed was set to shunt it into the siding, forcing it to head straight for the stationary freight train.
The express train derailed, throwing about a dozen passenger cars over both the siding and the mainline tracks like a spilled box of toothpicks. To make things worse, another express train, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express, arrived before emergency signals could reach it, and crashed into some of the derailed Coromandel cars, leading to further derailings and deaths.
As of today (Sunday June 4), the total fatality count stands at 275, with about 800 injuries. A preliminary investigation has pinned the cause to faulty signaling and switching. Obviously, if the signals had matched the position of the switches, the Coromandel Express would have been ordered to stop. But somehow, perhaps in a last-minute error, someone or something changed the switch from the main line to the siding, leading to the disaster.
Though the deaths of 275 people are horrific, this is not the worst train disaster in India's history. In August of 1995, two trains collided near New Delhi and 358 people died. This leads to the question of whether an Indian passenger is taking his life in his hands anytime he travels by rail. Surprisingly, the answer is "not necessarily."
There are several ways to measure the relative hazards of travel in different modes and locations. From an individual's point of view, the number that is most meaningful is probably the passenger-miles traveled for each fatality. The farther you can go without dying, the better. Surprisingly, by this measure it is about twice as dangerous to travel by rail in the U. S. as it is to travel by rail in India. The fatality rate in the U. S. is one for every 3.4 billion passenger-miles, and in India it is one for every 6.6 billion. Yet when even one passenger gets killed in a train wreck here, it's big news.
The difference can be partially explained by the fact that intercity passenger travel by rail in the U. S. is something only a few people do, whereas most of the middle and poorer classes in India travel by rail. The passenger-miles traveled in India every year is about 35 times that in the U. S. So even though the absolute number of train-related passenger fatalities in the U. S. is much smaller, we take the train even less than they do in India, and so our ratio of deaths to passenger-miles is worse.
Another difference is the density of people per train. I haven't taken a ride on Amtrak lately, or a regional line such as the Long Island Railroad, but it would surprise me if you could find a regularly scheduled train anywhere in the U. S. that carries 1200 people at a time. The more people on a single train, the more people can be hurt or killed if that train gets into trouble.
For a long time, railroads have been trying to devise foolproof systems of track switching. The so-called interlocking switches were originally devised in the 1850s. The idea was to guarantee that no combination of switches could be set that would lead to a collision. At first the systems were entirely mechanical, but by the 1890s electric-motor-activated switches were introduced, leading to electromechanical and later entirely electronic systems.
But even the best-designed systems can fail. Unless the trains themselves are controlled or monitored remotely (an element of what in the U. S. is called positive train control), a determined or confused individual may change a switch at the wrong moment, for example, just as an express train is heading toward the switch that leads to a siding. While this will automatically change the signals ahead of the switch, if the train has passed all the signals already, it's way too late to do anything about it.
Something like this may have happened in the Coromandel Express tragedy. Once the relevant parties are interviewed and records examined, a clearer picture of the cause should emerge. But at this point, that is small solace for the thousands of people who have lost relatives or loved ones in an accident that did not have to happen.
The tolerance for violent technology-related death varies from culture to culture. Here in the U. S., we have more or less passively accepted a rise in auto-related deaths over the last few years, despite numerous technological improvements such as safety belts and air bags that make accidents survivable which formerly would have been surefire killers. In 2020 and 2021, the fatality rate increased about 17%, partly no doubt due to COVID-19. But in 2022 the rate stayed about the same, which seems to indicate we changed something for the worse during the pandemic and haven't changed back. Whether the reason is increased drug and alcohol use, more reckless driving by depressed individuals, or some combination of factors, an extra 4,000 or so deaths per year has not really seemed to concern anybody, except when it's you or someone you love.
At any rate, I hope that this latest train accident will lead to further improvements in the already comparatively good safety record of Indian railways. Considering the huge numbers of people they transport every day, they are doing a better job by some measures than we are doing in the U. S. But there is always room for improvement, and as technology and organizational integrity improve, maybe this can be the last major train wreck in India for a long time.
Sources: I referred to an NBC News article on the wreck that appeared at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-train-crash-cause-signal-error-blamed-derailment-rcna87609. I also referred to statistics on comparative train-passenger fatality rates worldwide at https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-rail-safety/ and the Wikipedia article "Interlocking" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year.
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