A mangled bogie atop another after the crash at Badarwas station in Shivpuri (top); empty liquor bottles found inside the railway office after the crash. Pictures by Saeed Faruqui

Bhopal, Sept. 20: A goods train rammed into a stationary express at a small Madhya Pradesh station today, killing at least 23 people and putting the stationmaster in the glare for being allegedly drunk while on signal duty.

Rajendra Kadera, the stationmaster, has been arrested. Minutes after the crash, a search of his office in the station revealed several liquor bottles. Both the train drivers have been detained for questioning.

The goods train, which should have taken the central line and passed through Badarwas station without stopping, entered a loop line where the Indore-Gwalior Intercity Express was already standing.

It was pitch dark and raining around 5am when the accident occurred, and it is yet to be established if a signal error by Kadera led to the goods train entering the wrong line.

In railway terminology, a loop line is a branch line that deviates from the main track and rejoins it at another point.

The two front bogies of the express have been badly damaged and, apart from the 23 dead, all the passengers in the two compartments — at least 50 people — are injured.

Badarwas, in Shivpuri district in northern Madhya Pradesh, is a tiny station and Kadera had to work as a ticket-counter hand and signalman too. His job was to change the manual signals each time any train passed. The station does not have an automatic signalling system.

Some railway officials blamed the goods train driver. West central railway spokesman Piyush Mathur said: “Prima facie, it looks like overshooting the signal by the (goods) train driver is the reason.”

Just before the accident, the goods train driver apparently jumped off the locomotive and fled, railway sources said, but he was later traced and detained.

The driver of the Gwalior-bound express was standing on the platform when the accident occurred. He, too, is being questioned. Blood samples of the drivers and Kadera have been sent for tests.

Divisional railway manager Ghanshyam Singh said: “The reason (for the accident) will be established once the inquiry by the railways is completed.”

But in Delhi, a railway board member said preliminary probe reports indicated that the goods train driver and the station official were drunk. The railways have suspended the goods train driver and his assistant.

At dawn today, an army helicopter was sent to fly those seriously injured among the passengers from Badarwas to bigger cities for treatment. The initial relief operations at the station were slow because the nearest hospitals are in Shivpuri and Guna, 55km away.

Immediately after the accident, Rajesh Mangal, a passenger on the Indore-Gwalior Express, had called up a representative of a private TV channel in Gwalior and reported what had happened. Mangal said that till doctors arrived from Guna and Shivpuri, residents of Badarwas, which is 300km from Bhopal, provided first aid to the injured.

Railway minister Mamata Banerjee, whose home state Bengal saw two big train accidents in May and July, has announced compensation of Rs 5 lakh for the families of the dead, Rs 1 lakh for the seriously injured and Rs 50,000 for those with minor injuries.

A ministry statement said the railways would try to provide jobs to the next of kin of those killed.