Spanish train disaster raises network safety fears ahead of national election
One more body was found overnight, taking the death toll to 69.
Spain’s second high-speed rail disaster this year has raised fresh concerns about the safety of the country’s rail network ahead of a national election.
Search teams with sniffer dogs continued to look for victims on Thursday, a day after the collision in central Spain in which one train struck another from behind, killing 69 people.
Cranes shifted the carriages as police and soldiers picked through the wreckage strewn down the gravel slope where at least three train carriages were thrown by the impact.
One more body was found overnight, taking the death toll to 69, according to the regional leader of Castilla La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page.
He added that 50 people remained in hospital, while officials worked with family members to identify the dead.
“As a society, we have once again suffered a devastating blow, and we must adopt measures so that this doesn’t happen again,” King Felipe VI said after visiting injured passengers at a hospital in Toledo.
Spain’s government declared three days of mourning starting on Thursday. A minute of silence was held at various points at noon, including with legislators outside parliament and by rail workers and union leaders in Madrid’s main station.
Testimonies of survivors filled Spanish television for a second day. Pablo Lopez, who was on the train that was hit from behind, recounted the moment of impact and the horrific aftermath to state broadcaster TVE.
“The image I have in my head is of a person crawling on the ground after being shot out of the other train,” he said.
The high-speed rail network had been considered one of Spain’s crowning achievements. It is the world’s second-largest, after China’s, and until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service more than three decades ago.
The reputation of the Spanish railways was tarnished in January when 46 people died after one train jumped the track and slammed into the side of another going the opposite way in southern Spain.
Nine months later came the collision on Wednesday morning that turned a sleepy stretch of rail lined by olive groves near the village of Urda into a scene of carnage.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pledged an investigation and improvements to restore trust in a rail system that carried 45 million passengers last year, including millions of tourists.
“It is clear that we need to reinforce the safety of our train service to rebuild the trust in our high-speed rail,” he said. “It is not acceptable for a country like Spain to endure two high-speed train accidents in the same year.”
Mr Sanchez called the crash a “tragedy” when he visited the site a second time on Thursday, promising the victims and their families that the state would be with them.
Both deadly crashes this year took place on the same line between Madrid and Seville, the first of Spain’s high-speed network that opened in 1992.
Each collision involved a train operated by state-owned RENFE and another company operated by privately owned IRYO. Spain liberalised its high-speed rail service in 2021, with the Italian IRYO starting service the following year.
Mr Sanchez had hoped to leverage a wave of discontent over housing costs and high rents when he called for early elections on November 29.
He now faces questions about the safety of the railways, along with criticism from right-wing parties of his liberal migration policies and accusations of corruption against his party and his wife, which they deny.
Mr Sanchez’s main rival, conservative Popular Party leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, demanded a full investigation into the crash.
Alejandro Quiroga, a professor of political science at Madrid’s Complutense University, said: “This is not good news for the Socialist Party, but it may not hurt them very much because Spaniards generally don’t like it when politicians try to take advantage of tragedies.
“That could be changing, but up until now it is not seen positively.”
Transport minister Oscar Puente said on Wednesday that the crash was caused an “inexplicable” order from a central command centre for Spain’s trains after a security system failed.
He said the security system on a stretch of track stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. At that point the IRYO train was stopped, with the RENFE train 25km (15.5 miles) behind.
Minutes later the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it collided with the stationary IRYO train.
Spanish media on Thursday reproduced short audio clips of the controller ordering the train engineer to start moving.
Mr Puente said the train should never have been told to start moving again because a stop signal was still active on the line, and if it had, it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Train workers held a strike on Thursday that had already been planned before the Urda crash to demand the government make safety improvements that unions say were promised after the first deadly collision in January.
Union leaders questioned the minister putting all the blame on one controller and criticised the leaking of the control room’s conversations to the media.