A video depicting two trains colliding head-on has been circulating on social media, claimed to be the CCTV footage of the Odisha triple train accident. Through this article, let’s fact-check this claim.
Claim: The viral video shows CCTV footage of the triple train accident that occurred in Balasore, Odisha.
Fact: The video is from 2019, which captured a train accident when an MMTS local train collided head-on with Hundri Inter-City Express in Hyderabad, Telangana. This has nothing to do with Odisha. Hence the claim made in the post is False.
Our investigation revealed that the video captures a different incident in Hyderabad. Here are the details of our findings:
Upon careful analysis of the video, one of the trains in the footage appears to resemble a local train rather than an express passenger train. Additionally, a user on social media also expressed the same observation.
To gather more information, we performed a keyword search on the internet, focusing on collisions involving local trains. Our search led us to multiple news reports from 2019 that discussed a similar incident involving two trains colliding on the same railway track in Hyderabad.
One report, published by NDTV featured the same CCTV footage as in the circulated video. According to the report, the collision occurred in Hyderabad in the year 2019 as the loco pilot of a local MMTS train ignored a red signal and started the train. This action resulted in two trains ending up on the same track and colliding head-on. Several other news reports corroborated this incident, which you can read here and here. A clearer version of this CCTV footage can be found here.
To sum up, it is evident that the circulating video does not depict the Coromandel Express tragedy in Balasore, Odisha, as claimed. Instead, it represents an unrelated train collision incident in Hyderabad in 2019.
