The rail disaster involving the 19231 Indore-Rajendra Nagar (Patna) Express may well be the worst railway accident in India in several years. As I write this, the death toll has crossed 130. Here is the very basic information put out by the concerned zone (North Central Railway):
The accident site comes under Jhansi division of NCR whose HQ is at Allahabad. It was earlier on Central Railway.
The location is between Pokhrayan and Malasa stations on the Jhansi-Kanpur section. It would be about 45 km south-west of Kanpur Central station and 175 km north-east of Jhansi. Though not a trunk line, it has heavy passenger traffic with numerous trains from southern and western India to Kanpur, Lucknow and beyond. The site falls in Kanpur Dehat district.
Pokhrayan and Malasa can be seen on the map here:
However, it appears that Pukhrayan is the more common spelling of the town.
A list of accidents with a death roll of over 100 since 2000
(This is from memory, so there may be minor inaccuracies):
2002: Near Gaya, 116 killed in wrecking of Howrah-New Delhi Rajdhani.
2005: Near Hyderabad, 116 killed as passenger train plunges into flood waters in Nalgonda district.
2006: 7 bomb blasts on WR locals in Mumbai result is the deaths of at least 186.
2010: Near Kharagpur: 150 killed as a goods train collided with coaches of the Howrah-Mumbai Jnaneshwari Express, which had been derailed due to sabotage.
(It is also noted that some false reports of major disasters in the 2000s have been entered in Wikipedia, with no reference. I will have to clean them up).
Here is the story of the ill-fated train’s trip:
It can be seen that the last scheduled stop was at Orai, about 50 km short of the accident site. The route continues beyond Kanpur via Lucknow, Faizabad, Varanasi and Mughalsarai.
As to causes of the accident-all which can be said at the moment is that there could have been a defect in the tracks, or the loco, or rolling stock, or possibly a combination of these. Apart from tampering with the tracks, rail fractures and fractures of welded joints have been observed as causes of major derailments in recent years.
While there have been a number of incidents of sabotage of tracks in recent years, they have usually been in areas where extremist groups are active. That is not the case here. Apart from extremist sabotage, over the past 50 years there have been at least a couple of cases where disgruntled railway employees have caused major accidents by tampering with tracks.
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