Kalka Mail toll touches 68, may rise further

<< The death toll in the Howrah-Kalka Mail derailment rose to 68 on Monday.

The death toll in the Howrah-Kalka Mail derailment rose to 68 on Monday as the two train operators regained consciousness in a government hospital to shed light on what may have caused the wreck.

Top Railway officials who met the injured drivers A K Singh and Uma Kant Yadav quoted them as saying that when the train was at around 108kmph, its rear bogies began wobbling. The drivers tried to reduce the speed, bringing it down to nearly 70kmph, said the officials. When Singh and Yadav felt the wobbling did not stop, they applied the emergency brake.

"The next moment, all the bogies crashed into one another," the officials said quoting the drivers. The impact threw the drivers off and both lost consciousness, they said.

Nearly 260 injured passengers are admitted to different hospitals in Fatehpur, Allahabad and Kanpur. Two Swedish nationals were among the dead. One Swedish passenger is in a Kanpur hospital with multiple injuries.

Kalka Mail Derails in Uttar Pradesh, kills dozens

At least 31 people have been killed and more than 100 injured in a train derailment in northern India.

Thirteen coaches of the Kalka Mail passenger train left the rails near the town of Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh.

Rescue workers and locals arrived to try to free trapped passengers from the badly damaged carriages.

The train was travelling from Howrah near Calcutta to the capital Delhi. There are fears that the death toll could rise.
'Upside down'

The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has expressed his deep concern over the accident, the second in a week in Uttar Pradesh, and has directed the railway authorities to use all available resources for the relief operation.

Soldiers have been deployed to help in the rescue effort.

The cause of the derailment, about 120km (75 miles) south-east of Uttar Pradesh's capital, Lucknow, was not immediately clear.

Television footage showed carriages at skewed angles, with one on the roof of another and a third thrown clear of the train.

One passenger told CNN-IBN television: "We were sitting in our seats when suddenly everything turned upside down. When the train stopped we broke the glass windows to jump out on the track."

State police official Brij Lal told the Associated Press news agency: "We're trying to cut into the coaches and rescue those still trapped."

The driver was among those injured.

The number of people on board was not immediately clear but reports said there may have been up to 1,000 passengers.

Accidents are common on the state-owned Indian railway, an immense network connecting every corner of the vast country.

It operates 9,000 passenger trains and carries some 18 million passengers every day.

On Thursday, 38 people died in Uttar Pradesh when a train hit a bus carrying a wedding party.

No Need to Carry Train Tickets, show 'SMS'

Be ready to show SMS to ticket checkers instead of paper tickets in Indian Rail.

Your phone can double up as a train ticket now with the Indian Railways launching ‘m-ticket’ service, which does away with the need for paper tickets and printouts. If you have internet (GPRS) activated on your mobile, all you need to do is visit a new website called indianrailway.gov.in launched on Friday, and register for the service.

An SMS will bring the link of a tiny mobile application to your phone. Using GPRS (mobile internet), install the “App”, and you will never need to bother about carrying tickets for train travel anymore.

All you need to do is show the ticket examiner the ‘mobile reservation voucher’— an SMS containing your reservation information and back it up with a valid photo ID.

“With mobile phones becoming gadgets for business productivity and entertainment besides telephony, railways had to make its services available in this space,” said a railway ministry spokesman.

The website is still weeding out minor kinks involving page loading and user registration, but the railways are surging ahead with the plan for mobile devices. Travel agents and such bulk customers have been barred from using the service, as each ID can book up to eight tickets per month.

While currently the mobile application is compatible with most GSM and CDMA phones, sources said officials are deliberating specific applications for Blackberry and iPhone. Mobile ticketing is just one aspect of the website. Passengers can also book retiring rooms in advance.