An official probe into India's rail crash is focusing on suspected manual bypassing of an automated signalling system that guides train movement - an action investigators believe sent a packed express train into a stationary freight train, three Indian Railways sources told Reuters.
The Commission of Railway Safety investigators suspect the bypass was done by railway workers to get around signalling hurdles that arose from a malfunctioning barrier used to stop road traffic at a nearby rail-road intersection, two of the three sources said.The June 2 crash at Bahanaga Bazar station, in the Balasore district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha, killed at least 288 people and injured more than 1,000. It was India's worst rail crash in two decades.
A spokesman for the federal police’s Central Bureau of Investigation , which has opened a separate probe into possible criminal negligence, did not respond to a request for comment. "The electric barrier would sometimes go up and sometimes it wouldn’t," said Soubhagya Ranjan Sarangi, 25, a pharmacist with a shop close to the railway crossing.
The third source said the preliminary probe suggested that the signalling system was bypassed because the repair workers were trying to fix the malfunctioning barrier. Two days after the crash, Jaya Varma Sinha, a Railway Board member, told reporters that it appeared that the electronic signalling system, called the "interlocking system", had sent the Coromandel Express on the wrong track by giving it a green signal.
The manual workaround is allowed under railway protocols if it is authorised by an empowered senior official and all precautions are in place, said Sudhanshu Mishra, another retired railways official who worked in the safety department.
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