Gu­ra Pal­lay was watch­ing an­oth­er train pass by the one he was sit­ting in when he heard sud­den, loud screech­ing. Be­fore he could make sense of what was hap­pen­ing, he was thrown out of the train.

Pal­lay, 24, land­ed next to the tracks along with met­al wreck­age of the train he’d been rid­ing in, and in­stant­ly lost con­scious­ness. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the twist­ed re­mains of train on the tracks.

His train had de­railed af­ter col­lid­ing with a stopped freight train short­ly af­ter leav­ing Bal­a­sore, a coastal city about 200 kilo­me­tres (125 miles) north of the state cap­i­tal. An­oth­er pas­sen­ger train, the one he had seen pass by mo­ments ear­li­er, then hit the de­railed car­riages.

“I saw it with my own eyes, but I still can’t de­scribe what I saw. I am haunt­ed by it,” he said Sun­day at a hos­pi­tal, where he lay on a stretch­er with a bro­ken leg and dark wounds on his face and arms.

Pal­lay is a labour­er, like most of the peo­ple on­board the two pas­sen­ger trains that crashed Fri­day in the east­ern state of Odisha, killing 275 peo­ple and in­jur­ing hun­dreds. He was trav­el­ing to Chen­nai city in south­ern In­dia to take up a job in a pa­per mill fac­to­ry when the Coro­man­del Ex­press crashed with a goods freight train, knock­ing it off track, and was then hit by a sec­ond train com­ing from the op­po­site di­rec­tion on a par­al­lel track.

“I nev­er imag­ined some­thing like this could hap­pen, but I guess it was our fate,” he said.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors said Sun­day that a sig­nalling fail­ure might have caused the three-train crash, one of the worst rail dis­as­ters in the coun­try’s his­to­ry. Au­thor­i­ties rec­om­mend­ed that In­dia’s Cen­tral Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions, which probes ma­jor crim­i­nal cas­es, open an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the crash.

“We can’t bring back those we have lost, but the gov­ern­ment is with the fam­i­lies in their grief. Whoso­ev­er is found guilty will be pun­ished se­vere­ly,” Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Mo­di said Sat­ur­day while vis­it­ing the site of the ac­ci­dent.

The crash oc­curred as Mo­di’s gov­ern­ment is fo­cus­ing on the mod­ern­iza­tion of In­dia’s colo­nial-era rail­road net­work.

Sev­er­al sur­vivors of the crash said they were still strug­gling to com­pre­hend the dis­as­ter.

“Every­thing hap­pened so quick­ly,” said Sub­hashish Pa­tra, a stu­dent who was trav­el­ing 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 up. 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. On Mon­day, many peo­ple were still lined up out­side a hos­pi­tal in the state capi­tol wait­ing to iden­ti­fy and col­lect the bod­ies of rel­a­tives.

Alaudin, who goes by one name, trav­elled al­most 200 kilo­me­tres (124.3 miles) Sat­ur­day from West Ben­gal state to the crash site in Bal­a­sore to look for his broth­er, who was on one of the trains.

He learned about the crash from tele­vi­sion. When he tried to call his broth­er’s mo­bile phone to check on him, no one an­swered.

Wor­ried, he and his sis­ter-in-law rushed to the site of the crash af­ter­wards and spent all of Sat­ur­day look­ing for him in var­i­ous hos­pi­tals, hop­ing he would be alive. But his broth­er’s where­abouts re­mained un­known as the death toll con­tin­ued to rise.

Dis­traught, they fi­nal­ly made their way to the mor­tu­ary, where Alaudin’s broth­er body was wrapped in a black plas­tic bag and placed on top of blocks of melt­ing ice.

“I lost my broth­er, she lost her hus­band,” Alaudin said, point­ing to his sis­ter-in-law. “And his two boys have lost a fa­ther.”

His broth­er was 36 years old, Alaudin said. —BAL­A­SORE, In­dia (AP)

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Sto­ry by KRU­TI­KA PATHI and RISHI LEKHI | As­so­ci­at­ed Press