Faceless, Nameless and Dead by the Dozen in a Train’s Cheapest Cars

They cram themselves every day by the millions onto India’s overtaxed trains, chasing a shred of economic opportunity across the vastness of the world’s most populous nation.

Tickets costing about $5 — nearly a day’s wage — are all they can afford. For that, they stand shoulder to shoulder over long stretches in the middle of so-called general category coaches, far removed from the air-conditioned cars that lie beyond the pantry where workers prepare the rice, roti and chai for the journey.

It was these packed general coaches, right behind the engine of the Coromandel Express, that became a scene of unthinkable carnage just after sunset on June 2 when the train smashed into a parked freight train at 80 miles per hour in eastern India.

Almost all of the 288 dead were in those three cars at the front of the train — a fact, confirmed by officials, that has gone almost unnoticed in India. Unlike the 1,200 people in reserved seats, those in the general coaches were officially nameless; the rail service had no record of their identities. Their names and other details emerged only when they were taken to hospitals, or when loved ones traveling hundreds of miles identified their bodies in a morgue.

In the government’s initial reports on the crash, India’s worst train disaster in decades, its passenger count included only those in reserved seats, almost as though the hundreds in the general coaches did not exist.

“They were all people like me, poor,” said Rahul Kumar, a 28-year-old carpenter who was in one of the Coromandel general coaches, traveling to the southern city of Chennai. “Daily wage workers, laborers and people who can’t afford a ticket in the next compartment.”