Two Britons killed after train derails in northern India: police

Two Britons were killed and seven other passengers injured on Saturday when a train carrying tourists to the hill town of Shimla in northern India derailed, police said.

“Two British nationals have been killed. Another (Briton) is seriously injured,” S.Z.H Zaidi, a senior police official for Himachal Pradesh state, told AFP.

The train was a special chartered service carrying a group of 37 British tourists and a few Indian crew members.

The cause of the derailment was not immediately clear, but the Press Trust of India news agency said three carriages may have gone off the track because the train was travelling too fast.

The tiny Kalka-Shimla railway, which opened in 1903, is a tourist highlight of India’s Himachal Pradesh state, attracting thousands of visitors from both India and abroad.

Dubbed the “toy train”, it follows a scenic 96-kilometre (60-mile) route that includes 103 tunnels, travelling on a winding track from the town of Kalka up to Shimla, the former summer capital of India during British rule.