Spain's second high-speed crash of the year kills 69, a month before an election
A train was cleared to run at normal speed towards another that had stopped on the Madrid–Seville line. The transport minister blames an error in the control room and says he will not resign.
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At 08:53 on Wednesday 28th October, a Renfe AVE high-speed train ran into the back of an Iryo train that was standing at a signal1 near Urda, in the province of Toledo, about 120 kilometres down the line from Madrid.2 Both had left Madrid's Atocha station for Seville within ten minutes of each other. Spain's new accident investigators put the AVE's speed at impact, provisionally, at between 160 and 200 kilometres an hour.2
By Saturday the official count stood at 69 dead. Thirty-six had been identified, 34 people were still in hospital, 15 of them in intensive care, and 67 reports of missing people remained open.3 An early figure of 74 was corrected to 69 on Thursday.4 It is the deadliest rail crash in Spain since 2013, and the country's second on a high-speed line this year.
Twenty-two minutes
The Madrid–Seville line was Spain's first high-speed railway, opened for the Seville Expo in 1992. It is the last Spanish high-speed route still run with LZB, a German system that tells drivers how fast they may go and stops a train automatically if it has to. A contract to replace it with the European standard, awarded in 2021, has not been finished.5
On Friday the transport minister, Óscar Puente, set out what he said happened.1
At 08:31 the LZB system failed over a 63-kilometre stretch of the line, because of a communication fault between computers at the installation in Urda. The trains in that section stopped automatically. When LZB is down, trains are meant to run "on sight", at no more than 40 kilometres an hour, with drivers and the control centre in touch by telephone.5
At 08:36, Puente said, the control centre in Madrid run by Adif, the state company that manages Spain's tracks and signals, authorised the AVE to resume "a marcha normal": at normal speed. The LZB was still down, and the Iryo train was stopped ahead of it. At 08:41 the Iryo train was also cleared to move, but it could not restart. At 08:48 its driver told the control centre again that she could not move. The AVE kept going, and hit her train at about 08:53.1
"For the moment, the evidence points to what happened being due to a failure at Adif's control centre," Puente said.1 On Wednesday he had called the order "inexplicable" and said the drivers were not to blame.6 The controller involved has been taken off duty, which the ministry says does not assign responsibility.1
That account is the minister's. The investigation belongs to the AITAT, an independent authority that took over from Spain's old rail accident commission in July. Its first note says every hypothesis remains open, and its final report is due within a year. A court in Orgaz, near Toledo, has opened a separate criminal inquiry, under secrecy, and holds the trains' recorders.2 Still unexplained is why the 08:48 call did not stop the AVE, and why the lineside signals, which work without LZB, did not.
"The easy thing for me is to leave"
The crash came four weeks before a general election. Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist prime minister, called it on 5th October for 29th November, and polls published just before the crash put the conservative People's Party (PP) ahead, with the far-right Vox close enough to give the two a majority.7
"Today all of Spain is grieving," Sánchez said on Wednesday. "It is unacceptable for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in the same year."6 Three days of national mourning followed, and the main parties suspended campaign events.8
By Friday Puente was facing calls to resign. He refused. "The easy thing for me is to leave," he said. "But that isn't in keeping with my character." He added that Sánchez had not asked him to.1 He said the LZB system had suffered 170 incidents this year, about three-quarters of them from outside causes such as cable theft and vandalism.1
The opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said that "Spaniards are asking tough questions that demand answers". Vox's leader, Santiago Abascal, wrote: "We, too, are in mourning – but do not expect us to stay quiet."9
The second crash of the year
On 18th January, at Adamuz in Córdoba, on the same corridor, an Iryo train derailed and was struck by a Renfe train coming the other way. Forty-six people died. The investigators' preliminary finding, in April, was a broken rail.10 Before this year, Spain's worst rail accident of recent decades was at Angrois, outside Santiago de Compostela, in July 2013, when a train took a curve at more than twice the speed limit and 79 people died.11
The regional president, Emiliano García-Page, said everything indicated that the causes of the two crashes this year were unrelated.8
Where it stands
The line between Madrid and Andalusia is closed while carriages are lifted and the search goes on.3 Puente is due to answer questions in Congress on Tuesday 3rd November.3 What remains unknown is why an order to run at normal speed was given with the safety system down, whether anyone tried to stop the AVE in the five minutes after the Iryo driver's call, and how far a disaster in Toledo changes an election that the government was already expected to lose.