To pass the time during the long train ride to New Delhi from his home in central India, Kaushal Chand Pathak and his five brothers were playing cards in the last car of the Kalindi Express. At 3 in the morning, the train came to a sudden halt on the outskirts of Firozabad town. Pathak went outside to investigate and found that the locomotive's brakes had jammed after hitting a cow or a water buffalo on the tracks. He returned to his card game. "Then there was a loud noise," recalls Pathak, 22, "and the train stood up." Girish Sharma, a student living nearby, was studying late when he heard a mighty crash and ran to the site. He saw Pathak's train car poised perfectly upright, while others were scattered around like children's toys. Sharma immediately started helping evacuate the injured. "We were tripping over corpses all the time," he recalls.

Because of a wrong signal, the Puroshottam Express traveling at 110 km an hour had plowed into the stalled Kalindi Express from behind, killing more than 300 and injuring 220. The accident also created the kind of hellish spectacle that occurs when men and machines run spectacularly afoul of one another. Derailed cars that toppled down a 9-m embankment snapped power lines, and some passengers who survived the impact were then electrocuted in their berths. In the following days, rescuers laid bodies around the site and posted Polaroid photos of corpses and fragments at Firozabad station to aid searching relatives, creating a monumentally gruesome mural of sudden death and dismemberment. Locals say they even caught some policemen removing wallets and jewelry from the dead. Says resident Malda, who witnessed the carnage from the roof of her house 80 meters from the site: "My children fell sick just looking at this horrible sight."

India's rail system, with 63,000 kilometers of track, is one of the largest in the world and one of the most antiquated. Built by the British during the Raj, the railways remain the country's principal means of travel and shipping. But so little money has been invested over the years that the system also qualifies as a rolling railway museum. It has attracted nostalgic train buffs from abroad and appalled foreign engineers. Upkeep deteriorated as the government slashed railway subsidies without allowing operators to raise ticket prices or freight rates significantly.

Not surprisingly, accidents are commonplace. There were deaths or injuries in at least 500 railway accidents last year, and 520 the year before. The biggest wreck to date was in 1981, claiming 500 lives in Bihar state.

The crash last week occurred at one of the rail network's busiest intersections, where trains are separated by only 3-to-7-min. intervals. A railway inquiry has traced the cause to the western signal room of the Firozabad station, a small two-story structure equipped with crank-up phones, an ancient telegraph system and a bank of 28 1-m-high levers that have to be manually operated to control the signal lights.

At 3 a.m., signalman Ghore Lal Verma, a 35-year veteran of the railways, had cleared the Kalindi Express and was supposed to monitor its progress to Haripura, the next station down the track, before allowing the second train, the Puroshottam Express, to follow. But after proceeding one kilometer, the Kalindi Express hit an animal and pulled to a stop just short of an automatic switch, which would have changed the track's signal from green to red once the train had passed. Apparently Verma failed to determine whether the first train had completed the journey to Haripura and then misread the green signal, thinking the track had been cleared for the next train. He allowed the Puroshottam Express to proceed. Verma, who disappeared shortly after the wreck, was three hours into the graveyard shift and may have been drowsy. "He had done this so many times before," says fellow signalman S.N. Bannerji, "but just one mistake, and boom--there is a crash." Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao quickly called for the switching system to be automated and, somewhat less consolingly, said there should also be ways of identifying passengers who are packed into the cheaper, unreserved cars, to expedite identification of bodies in future crashes.

Moments after the wreck, Pathak managed to get clear of the wreckage but decided to return to save a sleeping relative. Only then did the already swaying car topple down the embankment, pinning Pathak inside. Three hours later, he managed to wave a stick through a window and was rescued. When he was hauled from the wreckage, he recalled later, "all I could see were dead bodies." Although one of his brothers remains missing, Pathak escaped with head injuries and a broken leg. His watch and cash were stolen before he reached the hospital, but it was no doubt a small price to pay for survival.

--Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly and Dick Thompson/Firozabad