Ten people were injured when a train struck the rear of a bus carrying schoolchildren, parents and teachers at an ungated railway crossing at Koggala in the Galle district on Sunday afternoon. The bus driver has been arrested.
The collision happened near the Martin Wickramasinghe Folk Museum, the Daily Mirror reported, when a train running from Beliatta to Maradana hit the back of the bus on the crossing. The paper puts the injured at ten, “including students”, and says they were taken to Karapitiya Teaching Hospital and other hospitals nearby.
The bus was carrying more than 50 passengers — students aged 14 and 15, along with parents and teachers — and was returning from an educational trip arranged for pupils attending a tuition class in Kottawa, on the southern outskirts of Colombo. Hiru News, whose first filing described it simply as a bus that had come on an excursion, reported the same event from Galle.
The crossing had no gates
Police told the Daily Mirror that the crossing where the collision occurred is not fitted with safety gates and depends instead on warning lights and a bell to signal an approaching train.
That detail places the crash in a pattern this desk has reported repeatedly this year. In August a 17-year-old girl was killed and two of her siblings injured at an ungated crossing in Kilinochchi, and a three-wheeler driver was killed at the Aluthgama crossing, after which residents blocked the coastal line in protest. An eight-year-old girl died at the Walpola crossing the same month.
Habaraduwa Police have arrested the bus driver, and investigations are continuing.
A count that moved through the afternoon
The casualty figure rose as the afternoon went on, and the sequence of filings shows it. Hiru’s first report, stamped 3.07 p.m. Colombo time, put six children in hospital. Its follow-up at 3.47 p.m. raised the number to ten and added the arrest. The Daily Mirror’s account was filed at 3.16 p.m.
Ada Derana moved three separate times on the story — first reporting six injured, then eight, then ten — but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 41 consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted from any of the three and they are named here rather than cited.
Not reported
The two outlets differ on who the ten are. Hiru and Ada Derana both describe ten children injured; the Daily Mirror says ten people, “including students”, alongside parents and teachers on board. Neither filing gives a breakdown, and none reports any death.
Neither account states the condition of the injured, whether the train was damaged or delayed, how the bus came to be on the crossing as the train approached, or whether the warning lights and bell were working at the time. The Department of Meteorology had warned of heavy rain across much of the island on Sunday; no filing attributes the collision to the weather.
NewsFirst had not filed on the collision at the time of writing.