Rescue workers pulled apart a mountain of twisted metal on Tuesday to get to hundreds of people believed trapped in the wreckage of two trains that collided head-on in northeastern India. At least 226 bodies have been extracted.

More than 200 others were thought to be inside three badly smashed train cars, but authorities fear none have survived.

The stench of rotting, charred flesh rose from a field where the railroad cars lay. No cries for help were heard from the wreckage, where arms and legs hung limply from crumpled carriages. The only sounds were the sobs of victims' families and the noise of rescuers tearing apart the tangled heap with cranes.

Only 22 of the recovered bodies could be recognized since most were so badly mangled, said senior local administrator who goes by the name Prashant.

Passengers were asleep when the trains collided before dawn on Monday, sending coaches spiraling over each other and hurtling travelers about their compartments.

"I heard an explosion and then the coach rose, as if it was an aircraft taking off, and then came down with a thud," S. Chettry, a cook in the pantry car, told The Indian Express newspaper.

One of the trains was on the wrong track for unknown reasons, railway officials said. Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said the accident was caused by human error, and announced on Tuesday that he would resign.

At least three railway signal operators working at the time of the accident fled the scene, authorities said.

The government announced Tuesday that it would set up a commission to investigate the causes of recent crashes. India's rails are plagued by accidents, which happen at a rate of more than one a day.

The collision of the Brahmaputra Mail train from Gauhati and the Awadh-Assam Express from New Delhi occurred in Gaisal Station, a small-town rail stop in West Bengal state about 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of Calcutta.

Both trains were traveling at about 90 kilometers per hour (60 mph) and the impact sparked a fire that engulfed some coaches, burning to death some of the 2,500 passengers aboard the two trains, officials at railway headquarters in Gauhati said.

Working by the dim light of gas lamps and generator-charged electric bulbs, officials quietly laid out the dead on a grassy clearing on Monday night and draped them with white shrouds.

The bodies were then loaded onto trucks and taken to the nearby town of Siliguri to be handed over to relatives.

Even experienced medical officers were shaken.

"We are used to seeing dead bodies daily, but I've never seen anything like this," said Dr. C. P. Singh on the private STAR television.

Relatives swarmed local hospitals, which were overflowing with nearly 300 injured passengers.

Two huge cranes arrived at the accident site early on Tuesday and began separating four railroad cars. Ten other carriages that were thrown off the track were to be lugged away.

It was one of the deadliest train accidents in India's history. In 1995, 358 people were killed in a train wreck near New Delhi and in 1981, nearly 800 died when a cyclone blew a train off the tracks into a river in the northern state of Bihar.

Many of the victims of Monday's collision were army soldiers or paramilitary troops traveling to or from Assam, a remote state in northeastern India wracked by separatist insurgency and tribal warfare.

Authorities resumed train services in the area on Tuesday after clearing one of the tracks.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called the accident "a great tragedy" and ordered an official inquiry. President K.R. Narayanan said the crash "highlights the crying need to improve rail safety measures."

In Washington, U.S. President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton offered condolences. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also mourned the deaths, spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York.

India has the world's largest railway network under one management with more than 14,000 trains carrying 12 million people daily. More than 400 accidents take place each year.