One train in Friday's accident also hit a freight train parked nearby in the district of Balasore in Odisha state in the east of the country, leaving a tangled mess of smashed rail cars and injuring 803.
The death toll has reached 288, said K. S. Anand, chief public relations officer of the South Eastern Railway.
Dead bodies are still trapped in the mangled coaches and the rescue operation is continuing, a Reuters witness said, while the death toll is expected to rise.
A preliminary report indicates that the accident was the result of signal failure, Anand said.
"The Coromandel Express was supposed to travel on the main line, but a signal was given for the loop line instead, and the train rammed into a goods train already parked over there. Its coaches then fell onto the tracks on either side, also derailing the Howrah Superfast Express," he said.
Surviving passenger Anubha Das said he would never forget the scene. "Families crushed away, limbless bodies and a bloodbath on the tracks," he said.
Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks, with rescue teams searching the mangled carriages to pull the survivors out and rush them to hospital.
Dead bodies were lying on the bloodstained floor of a school used as a makeshift morgue, and police helped relatives identify the bodies, covered with white cloths and placed inside chained bags.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at the scene, talked to rescue workers and inspected the wreckage. Healso met the survivors at hospitals.
"(I) took stock of the situation at the site of the tragedy in Odisha. Words can't capture my deep sorrow. We stand committed to providing all possible assistance to those affected," Modi said.
A witness involved in rescue operations said the screams and cries of the injured and the relatives of those killed were chilling. "It was horrific and heart-wrenching," he said.
Families of the dead will receive 1 million rupees ($12,000), while the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Some state governments have also announced compensation.
"It's a big, tragic accident," Vaishnaw told reporters after inspecting the accident site. "Our complete focus is on the rescue and relief operation, and we are trying to ensure that those injured get the best possible treatment."
DISMEMBERED BODIES
"I was asleep," an unidentified male survivor told NDTV news. "I was woken up by the noise of the train derailing. Suddenly I saw 10-15 people dead. I managed to come out of the coach, and then I saw a lot of dismembered bodies."
Video footage from Friday showed rescuers climbing on one of the mangled trains to find survivors, while passengers called for help and sobbed next to the wreckage.
"We rescued at least 30 people, and some of them managed to survive, but three or four of them died," said Sanjeev Rout, an electrician. A few metres away, rescue workers tried to cut their way into a damaged red-coloured coach.
The collision occurred at around 7pm (1330 GMT) on Friday when the Howrah Superfast Express from Bengaluru to Howrah in West Bengal collided with the Coromandel Express from Kolkata to Chennai.
Indian Railways says it transports more than 13 million people every day. But the state-run monopoly has had a patchy safety record because of ageing infrastructure.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik described the crash as "extremely tragic".
Opposition Congress party leader Jairam Ramesh said the accident reinforced why safety should always be the foremost priority of the rail network.
Modi's administration has launched high-speed trains as part of plans to modernise the network, but critics say it has not focused enough on safety and upgrading ageing infrastructure.
Experts said Friday's train accident came as a blow to Modi's makeover plans for railways.
India's deadliest railway accident was in 1981 when a train plunged off a bridge into a river in Bihar state, killing an estimated 800 people.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed condolences over the accident.
SURVIVOR RECOUNTS
Ompal Bhatia, a survivor of the three-train crash in India on Friday, had first thought he was dead. When the train he was traveling in went off-track, Bhatia was with three friends on his way to Chennai for work.
The 25-year-old had spent most of the four-hour journey on the Coromandel Express standing. Bhatia, who works in the plywood business, said that just before the trains crashed, leaving nearly 300 dead, some people were getting ready to sleep.
The rail car he was in, S3, was so full that there was only standing space. He had held on to a chain, as did his friends.
The train is often used by daily wage workers, and people who work as cheap labour in industries around Chennai and Bangalore. The coach Bhatia was traveling in was not air-conditioned.
The train, traveling past hills along India’s eastern coast, takes more than 24 hours to complete the journey of more than 1600 kilometres. Many, like Bhatia, travel the distance in over-crowded compartments, with only standing space.
It was dusk. Some who had seats were finishing their dinner, while others were trying to rest.
Another traveler in the same rail car, Moti Sheikh, 30, was also standing and chatting with a group of six other men from his village. They were planning to eat, and then sleep sitting on the floor as they didn’t have seats.
Suddenly there was a loud, violent noise, Bhatia and Sheikh said, and they felt the train suddenly start to move backwards. Sheikh first thought it was the sound of brakes, but then the coach tumbled.
"When the accident happened, we thought we were dead. When we realized we were alive, we started making our way towards the emergency window to get out of the train. The rail car had gone off the track and had fallen to one side," Bhatia told Reuters over the phone on Saturday.
As he and his friends got out, he said there was chaos all around.
"We saw a lot of dead people. Everybody was either trying to save their lives or looking for loved ones," he said. Fortunately, he and his friends survived.
Sheikh said that he and his friends also felt they would not survive. "We were crying when we came out," he said, adding that help came only after about 20 minutes.
The Coromandel Express had gone off track, hit a goods train that was parked there, and then collided with a second train coming from the opposite direction.
A preliminary report has blamed a signal failure for the accident, which has left over 800 injured. As the rescue operations continue, the number of dead is likely to rise.
Archana Paul, a housewife from West Bengal, was in the other train, the Howrah Yesvantpur Express, when the crash happened.
"There was a massive noise, and everything became dark," she said.
Traveling with her brother and 10-year-old son, Paul realized that the train had derailed. "I was OK, so I started searching for my son and brother, but could not see them."
She said people started to slowly get to their feet. "They asked me to get out, but I said no, I need to search for my son. But they insisted I first get out."
She was brought out of the rail car and waited for her son to emerge. But he didn’t, and as she was bleeding she was put in an ambulance and taken to a hospital in Balasore.
Lying in a hospital bed, Paul started to cry as she spoke to Reuters and asked for help to find her son.
Also traveling in the Howrah Yeshvantpur Express was Kaushida Das, around 55 years old. She survived the crash but her daughter died.
"Even though I have survived, there is nothing to live for. My daughter was everything to me," she said.
