Odisha train tragedy: Only Coromandel Express was derailed, Kavach would not have helped: Railway Board member

Triple train crash at Balasore district in Odisha

The Railway Board on June 4 explained the events that led to the catastrophic train accident in Odisha's Balasore on Friday night that killed 275 people and left over 1,000 injured.

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi, Jaya Varma Sinha, Member of Operation and Business Development, Railway Board said that as per preliminary findings, there was “some issue with the signalling.”

Earlier, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also stated that the accident was caused by an issue with the “electronic interlocking system”.

Sinha said the goods train did not get derailed and it was only the Coromandel Express that met with the accident, stressing that only one train suffered an accident.

She further explained that the Coromandel Express crashed into the goods train that was full of iron ore stationed on one of the loop lines and that the latter absorbed all the shock, thus throwing the former train onto the third track and ramming into a couple of coaches of the train approaching at high speed from Howrah.

“The goods train did not get derailed. Since the goods train was carrying iron ores, the maximum damage of the impact was on the Coromandel Express. This is the reason for a huge number of deaths and injuries,” Sinha pointed out.

The Coromandel Express was going at the speed of 128 km per hour, she said.

She also stated that the derailed bogies of the Coromandel Express came on the downline and hit the last two bogies of the Yashwantpur Express which was crossing at a speed of 126 km per hr.

Dismissing West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee’s query on the absence of Kavach, Sinha reiterated the railway minister’s assertion that the accident had nothing to do with the absence of Kavach, which anyway would not have been helpful in avoiding such an accident. She further claimed that no technology would be capable of averting such an accident.

Kavach is the indigenous Automatic Train Protection (ATP) System that the Railway Ministry developed in 2022.

The system alerts when a loco pilot jumps a signal (Signal Passed at Danger -- SPAD), which is among the leading causes of train collisions. The system can alert the loco pilot, take control of the brakes and bring the train to a halt automatically when it notices another train on the same line within a prescribed distance.