BHUBANESWAR: Workers repairing a rail-road barrier in India made faulty connections in the automated signalling system on the network, leading to the country’s worst rail disaster in two decades, an official probe has found.

The June 2 crash at Bahanaga Bazar station, in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, killed 288 people and injured more than 1,000.

The disaster struck when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped off the tracks and hit another passenger train coming from the opposite direction.

In the probe report, seen by Reuters, the Commission of Railway Safety (CRS) investigators said the first collision occurred due to modifications done to the signalling circuit to fix frequent problems at a nearby rail-road barrier.

Local railway staff did not have a standard circuit diagram which led to a faulty connection in the signalling system when they tried to take the boom-barrier circuit offline for repair, it said. The malfunctioning system directed the passenger train onto the path of the freight train, it said.

Reuters last month reported for the first time that investigators were focusing on the repair work on the rail-road barrier and its possible connection to a manual bypass of the signalling system.

Indian railways, the fourth largest train network in the world, is a state monopoly run by the Railway Board. The board reports to the railways ministry.

The rail network is undergoing a $30 billion transformation with glea­ming new trains and modern stations under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to boost infrastructure and connectivity but the crash raised questions about whether safety was getting enough attention.

The CRS probe report said there were lapses at multiple levels in the signal and telecom department and standard operating procedures were not followed during the repair work.

Last month Reuters reported that investigators were focusing on the repair work on the rail-road barrier and its possible connection to a manual bypass of the signalling system.

Indian and international media have previously reported that a possible malfunction in the automated signalling system may have led to the crash.

Residents of Bahanaga village also told Reuters the barrier at the railway crossing had been faulty for nearly three months and had been repaired frequently.

When there was a fault, the barrier would remain stuck in the closed position and had to be manually opened by railway workers, the residents said.

If the barrier was open, the automated signal system would not allow a train to go past the rail-road crossing, one retired Indian Railways official said.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2023