URDA, Spain (AP) — Was Spain’s second major train collision in nine months caused by human error, or did it stem from deeper problems in its once- vaunted high-speed rail network?
Transport Minister Óscar Puente has blamed a traffic controller’s poor judgment for much of what went wrong in Wednesday’s collision in Toledo province, which killed at least 69 people.
Railway unions have pushed back, citing deteriorating working conditions. They say too few controllers are handling growing workloads, making it increasingly difficult to ensure the safety of millions of passengers.
As the country sought answers on Friday, police with sniffer dogs continued searching the wreckage. Regional authorities warned that the death toll could rise.
It was the second major crash on the Madrid-Seville line this year. In January, more than two hours farther south along the route, a train derailed and struck another traveling in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That crash remains under investigation.
“It is unacceptable that a country like Spain with such a strong high-speed railway has two accidents of this type in the same year,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Friday at the crash site near Urda.
Spain’s high-speed rail network, the world’s second-largest after China’s, has long been regarded as a success of state industrial policy. Until this year, it had recorded no fatal crashes since entering service more than three decades ago.
Japan’s high-speed rail, in contrast, has not had a derailment or collision resulting in a fatality since it started in 1964.
The timeline of the catastrophe given by the government
The chain of events that ended in disaster started at 8:31 a.m. on Wednesday, when the communication system key to the functioning of the security system on the Madrid-Seville line went down. The system, called LZB, monitors the position of trains with digital sensors and can automatically apply their brakes to prevent a collision.
The backup safety system, which is the primary system on older, low-speed commuter lines, didn’t help out because the trains were both inside the same stretch between two analogue sensors.
That meant that traffic controllers based at a control post in Madrid took over full responsibility for monitoring the positions and safety of the trains on a stretch of 63 kilometers (39 miles). At the time of the accident, there were 16 controllers in the control post and two monitoring the Madrid-Seville line.
At 8:36, a controller told one train, belonging to state-owned RENFE, that it could start running again at normal speed. The other train, operated by privately owned IRYO and located 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) down the line, also tried to restart, but the engineer was unable to restart the train. The IRYO conductor told the control center, but the RENFE train was not told to stop.
Recordings leaked to Spanish media contain snippets of apparently hectic conversations between the engineers on the trains and the traffic controllers in Madrid in the minutes before the accident.
At 8:53, the collision occurred, derailing carriages and shredding parts of the trains to bits.
The independent investigators said their initial findings indicated that the RENFE train was moving at between 160 and 200 kph (100-125 mph) when it struck the IRYO train.
Transport minister points the finger at traffic controllers
Puente, who is under pressure to resign, called the controller’s decision to let one train restart at full speed while the other remained stationary “inexplicable” and “erroneous” when he spoke to the media in the immediate aftermath of the crash.
“I won’t use a worker as a shield,” Puente told reporters in a 2-hour-long news conference Friday, but added that “the information points to a mistake in the control center.”
Unions say controllers have too many trains to supervise
Unions, however, say working conditions must also be considered.
Raquel Ayllón, spokesperson for SCF, Spain’s railway traffic controllers’ union, told The Associated Press that workloads regularly exceed what current staffing levels can safely support.
“We believe (the minister) is blaming a mere worker who was working under increasingly poor conditions,” Ayllón said. “Human error isn’t incomprehensible. What is incomprehensible is that the safety system is regularly failing.”
The liberalization of Spain’s high-speed rail market and the arrival of private operators have driven a sharp rise in passenger numbers. Rail journeys rose from 35 million in 2019 to 49 million in 2024, according to the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission.
Both collisions this year involved a RENFE train and an IRYO train.
“We are not convinced that the liberalization of the high-speed passenger rail service was matched by the necessary upkeep of the lines,” said Joan Rodríguez of Spain’s train workers’ union.
Puente defended his ministry, saying the number of rail traffic controllers had risen from 1,000 in 2016 to 1,700 today.
Questions over safety systems
The SEMAF train engineers’ union said the three-decade-old LZB train safety system, which is being phased out but remains in use on the Madrid-Seville line, repeatedly goes offline.
“The LZB system should have been replaced some time ago,” said union spokesperson Diego Martín.
Puente acknowledged that the German-made system regularly goes offline for reasons including infrastructure damage caused by vandalism, maintenance work and bad weather. He said it had gone offline 170 times this year, describing that figure as “normal” and in line with recent annual averages.
The minister said Spain was ahead of most other European countries in replacing LZB with a new system required by the European Union.
Investigation continues as families await news
Investigators from a specialist rail accident committee removed the trains’ black boxes late Thursday and handed them to the Civil Guard for examination. A judge is also investigating the crash.
Seventy families have filed missing persons reports with police for passengers still unaccounted for. Only five bodies have been identified so far. Of the more than 200 people injured, 39 remained hospitalized Friday.
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Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain, while Mari Yamaguchi contributed from Tokyo.
By JOSEPH WILSON and IAIN SULLIVAN
Associated Press
