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The accident reignited debate over the precarious state of Pakistan’s public transport system.
A train that derailed on the way to another oncoming passenger express began its journey despite a faulty connection, Pakistan’s Minister of Railways said on Wednesday, as authorities investigated the cause of an accident which killed 63 people.
The Sir Syed Express passenger train passed through the coaches of the Millat Express on Monday, which had derailed a few minutes earlier near Daharki in Sindh province.
The accident reignited debate over the precarious state of Pakistan’s public transport system – particularly a rail network that has seen little investment for decades.
“The buffer seal of Millat Express car number 10 was defective and bolts were also loose, resulting in a derailment,” Minister of Railways Azam Swati told a press conference in Lahore.
The buffer seal, or coupling, connects the carriages.
Swati attributed the crash to aging rolling stock – some of which is over 50 years old – and called for massive investments in the country’s rail network, prone to creaks and crashes.
“We are a poor country and we don’t even have new technology to overhaul coaches,” he said, adding that technicians “were still using hammers.”
Swati said some 22 senior and junior officials were partly responsible for a chain of errors that led to the crash and would be “taken to task.”
He said most of the casualties were from the train collision rather than the derailment.
The incident occurred before dawn on a remote part of the track surrounded by farmland.
As locals rushed to the scene to help, it took hours for specialized machines to arrive to cut people from the tangled wreckage.
The majority of Pakistani train passengers are working class people who cannot afford faster bus trips.
More than 300 people were killed and 700 injured in 1990 when an intercity train overloaded with 16 cars crashed into a stationary freight train near the town of Sukkur in Sindh.
More recently, at least 75 people died when a train caught fire while traveling from Karachi to Rawalpindi in October 2019.
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