Death smells awful. That's the first thing Ramvati discovered when she reached the site where two trains had collided in Ferozabad, a dusty town on the plains of India 200 kilometers east of New Delhi, in search of her missing husband. Next she found crashed, broken wagons scattered around an embankment, twisted into giant knots of iron. Dazed survivors sat in silence. Onlookers pointed out blood and dismembered limbs. The cloying smell of putrefying bodies hung in the air, as pieces too mangled to be identified were burnt in a mass pyre. Where was her husband?

			P A K I S T A N Photographs by JOHN STANMEYER I N D I A Photographs by JOHN STANMEYER

Train travel may be romantic: it can also be fatal, even outside the developing world, as recent crashes in London and near Washington have shown. Everyone fears dying in a plane crash—trapped at 10,000 m, helpless against wind shear or terrorists—but most people are not as scared of a rail accident. On a train, the argument goes, there is a chance to escape.

That wasn't the case for Ramvati's husband, a poor peasant from a nearby village: he didn't have a moment to save himself or even mutter his last prayers. That morning in Aug. 1995, he was on his way to the nearby city of Agra to sell a basketful of garlic. He hopped on the rear car of the Kalindi Express, a long-distance passenger train, without buying a ticket. At around 3 a.m., another train, the Purushottam Express, smashed at full speed into his train car. The impact was devastating: nothing remained afterwards of the coach, nor of the Purushottam Express locomotive. Nearly 340 people were killed and 400 injured in the worst accident blamed on human error in the history of the Indian Railways. Ramvati's husband was obliterated.

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An average of 300 people die in rail accidents every year in India, many more than perish in planes. Indian Railways has two distinct classifications for wrecks: "miscellaneous train accidents" (400 in 2001) and "consequential train accidents" (473).

The Ferozabad crash started off as a miscellaneous accident, which is defined as a train wreck or crash caused by an obstruction, such as an animal or a human, on the track. That morning a herd of water buffaloes chose to languidly cross the railway tracks, the engine driver of the Kalindi Express couldn't brake swiftly enough, and one beast was killed.

The train stopped and a crowd gathered to argue over who would move the dead buffalo. The engine driver failed to alert the nearest station that he had halted. The local signalman should have noticed: he has a tracking device that clicks when a train is still on his circuit. Maybe the machine wasn't working, or he wasn't listening. He pushed the "all clear" lever, opening the line for the Purushottam Express to crash into the stalled train, creating a consequential train accident, which is described in the safety manual as: "collisions, derailments, trains running into road traffic at level crossings, fire in trains and miscellaneous accidents involving passengers."

Indian Railways, in fact, has a good safety record: 300 yearly deaths are not a lot for a system with 63,028 kilometers of track, 14,000 trains and 13 million passengers per day. But overall, taking the train is riskier than, say, flying commercial airlines. Ramvati, the illiterate village widow, saw that danger close-up. After searching in vain for her husband in a makeshift morgue and in local hospitals, she went back to the site of the wreck that claimed him, sat on the ground and howled.

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