At least 50 people were killed and more than 250 injured in a head-on collision between two passenger trains in the northern Indian province of Punjab today.

Several coaches derailed when the Jammu Tawi Ahmedabad express crashed into a local train in the Hoshiarpur district, 180 miles north-west of New Delhi, at around noon local time (0630 GMT) in a tragedy which will further tarnish the unenviable safety record of the nation’s vast railway network.

Emergency rescue teams were joined by soldiers from the nearby cities of Pathankot and Jalandhar and local villagers in a frantic effort to free the dead and injured from the five coaches which buckled in the impact.

Announcing news of the accident earlier today, Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav said: "I have been told by officials that 15 to 20 people have died."

The death toll has since risen and unofficial reports suggest at least 50 fatalities, including 15 men, 11 women and one child.

At the scene 21 bodies were lined up on the ground. Others had been sent to hospital morgues. The injured were being rushed to local hospitals.

The express train was carrying some Hindu pilgrims home
from Vaishno Devi, a revered shrine in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir state.

Mr Yadav was en route to the scene of the collision as an investigation began to determine how the express, travelling between Jammu in Kashmir and Bhopal with some 700 passengers, came to be sharing the same track as the oncoming local train on the approach to a village railway station.

Mr Yadav said: "“The guilty will be punished after the reason is known."

A spokesman for the Punjab police chief’s office told the Reuters news agency earlier: "The information we have is that 25 to 30 people are dead and more than 250 injured.

"We are removing bodies from the coaches. The toll may go up."

India has one of the largest railway networks in the world, with some 14,000 trains carrying more than 13 million passengers daily on 108,700 km of track.

However, much of the track is antiquated and still depends on manually-operated signalling equipment.

Rock-bottom fares and an excessively large workforce have saddled the creaking system with huge financial losses.

There are around 300 accidents reported every year and little money available for investment into infrastructure and safety.

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