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Indian train service to resume after deadly crash

One of the train services involved in a triple collision in India’s deadliest railway disaster in decades resumes on Wednesday, as officials revised the death toll up to 288.

“The Coromandal Express is back on track,” railway spokesman Aditya Kumar Chaudhary told reporters, with the train set to depart Shalimar station near Kolkata on Wednesday afternoon on a 25-hour journey south to Chennai.

The service was one of three trains involved in the crash near Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha on Friday.

Odisha’s chief secretary Pradeep Jena said late on Tuesday the official death toll had risen to 288, up from an earlier official total of 275.

At least 1,175 people were injured, many of them in critical condition and still being treated in hospital.

Jena said the revised toll came after deaths were tallied from both hospitals and mortuaries and noted that 83 bodies remain unidentified.

While trains began operating late Sunday past the crash site, Wednesday’s journey will be the first service of the Coromandal Express to resume the route.

India has one of the world’s largest rail networks and has seen several disasters over the years, the worst of them in 1981 when a train derailed while crossing a bridge in Bihar and plunged into the river below, killing some 800 people.

The Balasore crash is India’s third worst and the deadliest since 1995, when more than 300 people died when trains collided in Firozabad near Agra.

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