Patna, Dec 2 Thirty five people were killed when a 150-year-old bridge collapsed on an overcrowded Howrah-Jamalpur Superfast train in Bihar's Bhagalpur district early Saturday in a tragedy waiting to happen.

Mammoth slabs of metal, cement and mortar thundered over a sleeper class of the train coming from Howrah in West Bengal and on its way to Jamalpur in Bihar, barely 50 km from its destination.

The disaster simply crushed many passengers, many of whom were travelling illegally on the roof of the coaches and hanging on the doors, and seriously wounding many.

S. Majumdar, chief spokesman of Eastern Railways, told that the toll might go up, with rescue workers still struggling to extricate bodies from the mangled coach.

"Initially we thought there was only one casualty, because only the toilet part of the S-8 coach was crushed. Now it seems people were sitting on the train roof and also hanging to its sides," he said on telephone from Kolkata.

Six of the bodies were in the Bhagalpur Government Hospital and three at the Bhagalpur railway station, a district official said.

The villagers said they rescued over 30 people before official help arrived.

Railway Minister Lalu Prasad ordered a probe into the accident and announced a compensation of Rs.100,000 to families of the dead besides promising a job in the government.

The aged bridge, 'Ulta Pul', was being dismantled when it suddenly came down on the train.

According to villagers, a portion of the damaged bridge was hanging loosely but trains continued to run underneath, unaware of the danger lurking overhead.

On Saturday, reverberations from the plying of the train apparently caused the bridge to simply come apart.

Lalu Prasad, campaigning for the Congress in a byelection in Bihar's Katihar district, vowed to crack down on errant railway engineers who allowed a tragedy of this kind to take place.

He said he had sought the suspension of errant officials. "I have ordered that harsh action be taken against the guilty."

Thousands of people have crowded around the accident site, hampering rescue operations. By late afternoon railway officials had pressed giant cranes to take out the crushed rail carriage and resume rail traffic on the section.