Workers charged with culpable homicide and destruction of evidence after one of country’s deadliest rail accidents

Three men have been arrested in India over a triple-train collision that killed nearly 300 people last month, one of the worst rail accidents in the country’s history, police have said.

The train crash in eastern Odisha state occurred when a packed passenger train was mistakenly diverted on to a loop line and hit a stationary goods train.

Though the number of railway accidents has come down in the past few years, derailment remains the main cause

There is no railway system quite like the Indian railways. Trains remain an essential lifeline in India, the world’s most populous country of 1.4 billion people, carrying about 13 million passengers a day for work, family and leisure on trains that weave across 40,000 miles of track, more than enough to wrap around the Earth.

Friday night’s collision involving two passenger trains and a freight train in the eastern state of Odisha was one of the worst accidents since 1999, when a collision between two trains in West Bengal killed 285 people. More recently, 160 people died in 2016 when the Indore-Patna Express derailed and as recently as February, two goods trains collided in Uttar Pradesh.

Rescue operation under way with death toll expected to rise in India’s worst rail disaster in more than 20 years

• ‘Wailing for help’: passengers and bystanders tell of India train crash horror

At least 288 people have been killed and 803 injured after two passenger trains collided in the eastern Indian state of Odisha – the country’s deadliest rail disaster in more than 20 years.

The Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata in West Bengal to Chennai in Tamil Nadu, was going about 80mph (130km/h) when it collided with a stationary freight train at about 7pm on Friday, causing it to derail.