Daily Times

PUKHRAYAN: The last thing Uttam Kumar remembered before he fell unconscious was a huge bang as his carriage was violently crushed.

When he came to his senses, he was trapped upside down in the wreckage of an Indian train that killed more than 140 people on Sunday.

Fighting back tears, the 26-year-old business student recalled how he waited for three hours to be cut out of the mangled train carriage. When the rescuers finally put him in an ambulance, there were only dead bodies for company.

“It was like being in a nightmare. It was happening, but I couldn’t believe it was happening,” he told AFP from his hospital bed in the northern city of Kanpur near the accident site. “They cut the part of the carriage where I was stuck and pulled me out. Then I remember being moved to an ambulance, which was parked next to the site. I was the only one alive.”

An estimated 2,000 people were on board the train that derailed at around 3 am, violently jolting passengers out of their sleep.

So far, 142 bodies have been pulled from the wreckage and rescue workers said that many bodies were so badly damaged that they were unrecognisable and that they expect the toll to rise.