India's rocky railway network has seen a series of accidents over the years, but dramatic footage of a train derailment filmed in the southern megacity of Chennai in December 2024 was not, contrary to rumors on Facebook and Instagram. The incident described in the posts was made up, Indian authorities told AFP, and the video actually showed a fatal accident in Chile in June 2024.
“Vande Bharat train met with accident,” read the Hindi language Facebook post who shared the video on January 1, referring to the state-run multi-city rail service.
The picture shows an amazing car of a train, with one car attached to the top of another compartment.
Hindi text overlaid on the clip reads: “Vande Bharat Express met with an accident in Chennai on December 29, 2024, at 2 am.”
A screenshot of the fake post taken on January 5, 2025
The video made the rounds in similar posts Instagram and Facebook.
India has one of the largest railway networks in the world and it is seen several disasters over the years (archive link).
The worst happened in 1981 when a train derailed while crossing a bridge in the state of Bihar, killing around 800 people.
Nearly 300 people were killed in a three-train accident in the state of Odisha in June 2023, when a packed passenger train was mistakenly diverted onto a loop line and rammed into a stationary freight train full of iron ore.
The circular posts, however, were baseless according to the Indian railway authority.
“Vande Bharat train has never met with an accident in Chennai,” a a spokesperson for Southern Railway told AFP on January 15.This is completely fake news.”
Chile disaster
A background image search of the video on Google found similar footage in a report about a train accident in Chile.
AFP posted the clip on June 20 in a YouTube video with the title: “Train accident in Chile kills two” (archive link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in fake social media posts (left) and the AFP video (right).
A screenshot comparison of the video shared in fake social media posts (left) and an AFP video (right)
Two people died and nine were injured in a head-on collision between a freight train and an empty locomotive that was carrying out tests on the outskirts of the capital Santiago, AFP reported(archive link).
The accident took the lives of the freight train driver and his assistant.
The freight train is owned by the private company Pacific Railways (Fepasa) while the the locomotive was owned by the state railway company EFE, the report said.
The The Fepasa logo is clearly visiblet the 36-second mark of the AFP video, as shown in the image below:
