“Everything happened so quickly,” said Subhashish Patra, a student who was travelling with his family from Balasore to the state capital, Bhubaneswar, on the Coromandel Express. He was planning to take his mother to a hospital in Bhubaneswar to seek treatment for a hand injury and then to travel to Puri, home to one of Odisha’s most important temples.
The first thing Patra could make sense of after the crash was the sound of children crying. People were screaming for help in the dark, and around him lay corpses.
“There were dead bodies all around me,” he said.
Patra said the rail carriage he was in landed with the door facing upwards. He climbed onto a pile of wreckage inside the train and managed to pull himself out.
At the hospital on Sunday, Patra’s head was bandaged in gauze as he waited for an MRI scan. His head was throbbing with pain, he said, but he was grateful that he and his entire family had survived.
Others weren’t so lucky.
Alaudin, who goes by one name, travelled almost 200km on Saturday from West Bengal state to the crash site, to look for his brother, who was onboard one of the trains.
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