At least 120 people have been killed and more than 850 injured after two passenger trains collided in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata to Chennai, collided with another passenger train, the Howrah Superfast Express, railway officials said on Friday. The Howrah Superfast Express derailed and became entangled with the Coromandel Express, South Eastern Railway authorities said in a statement. Media reports had earlier said the crash was between the Coromandel Express and a goods train. The Odisha Fire Services official Sudhanshu Sarangi told reporters at the site: “We have now recovered more than 120 dead bodies.” Odisha state’s chief secretary, Pradeep Jena, told the AFP news agency: “Our top priority now is rescuing (the passengers) and providing health support to the injured.” One survivor told local television news that he had been sleeping when the accident happened and woke to find himself trapped under about a dozen passengers before crawling out from the carriage with only injuries to his neck and arm. SK Panda, a spokesperson in Jena’s office in Odisha state, called it “a heavy accident”. “We expect that the rescue work will continue till at least tomorrow morning,” Panda said. “On our part, we have prepared all big government and private hospitals from the accident site to the state capital to cater to the injured.” The spokesperson added authorities had already rushed “75 ambulances to the site and had also deployed many buses” to transport the injured passengers and survivors from the site. Images from the scene showed rescuers climbing up the mangled wreck of one of the trains to find survivors. Hundreds of young people lined up outside a government hospital in the city of Soro in Odisha to donate blood. An witness told Reuters: “I was there at the site and I can see bloods, broken limbs and people dying around me.” The Odisha chief minister, Naveen Patnaik, said authorities’ priority was “removing the living to the hospitals, that’s our first concern, to look after the living”. Rescue operations were under way at the site and “all possible assistance” is being given to those affected, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, said. Modi tweeted: “In this hour of grief, my thoughts are with the bereaved families. May the injured recover soon.” Rescue teams have been mobilised from Odisha’s Bhubaneswar and Kolkata in West Bengal, the federal minister for railways, Ashwini Vaishnaw, added. The National Disaster Response Force, state government teams and the air force had also mobilised to respond to the incident, he said. Despite government efforts to improve safety, several hundred accidents occur every year on India’s railways, which with 40,000 miles (64,000km) of track is the world’s largest network under one management. Two trains collided near Delhi in August 1995, killing 358 people in the worst train accident in India’s history. Most train accidents are blamed on human error or outdated signalling equipment. More than 12 million people travel on 14,000 trains a day across India.