BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Was Spain second major train collision this year caused by human error or failures in its vaunted high-speed rail network?
It depends who you ask.
Spain’s transport minister was quick to place most of the blame on the poor judgment of a traffic controller. Wednesday’s collision in the province of Toledo, which killed 69 people.
But the rail unions are opposed. Instead, they point to what they describe as deteriorating working conditions – fewer traffic controllers and more work than ever – that make it increasingly difficult to ensure the safety of 45 million passengers each year.
A judge and a special government commission are conducting separate investigations into the deadly accident, while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has vowed to get to the bottom of the matter.
Police, accompanied by sniffer dogs, were still combing through the rubble Friday morning.
Investigators from a special commission for railway accidents removed the black boxes from the trains on Thursday evening and handed them over to the Civil Guard for inspection.
“This investigation must determine how and why this catastrophe occurred,” Spanish King Felipe VI said Thursday after visit injured passengers in a hospital in Toledo. “We will have to take action to ensure that this does not happen again.”
This is the second major accident on the Madrid-Seville line this year. In January, more than two hours further south, a train I jumped the track and hit another one going in the opposite direction, killing 46 people.
Spain’s high-speed rail network is considered a success of the state’s industrial policy. It is the second largest country in the world, after China. Until this year, it had not experienced a fatal accident since it was commissioned more than thirty years ago.
The chronology of the disaster given by the government
The chain of events that ended in disaster began at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, when the communications system essential to the operation of the line’s safety system failed. The system, called LZB, monitors the position of trains and can automatically apply their brakes to avoid a collision.
The malfunction meant that traffic controllers based at a checkpoint in Madrid took full responsibility for controlling the position and safety of trains on a 63-kilometer (39-mile) stretch between Madrid and Seville. At that time, authorities believed there were six trains on the affected section of track.
At 8:36 a.m., a controller indicated to a train, belonging to the public company RENFE, that it could resume traveling at normal speed. The other train, operated by the private company IRYO and located 25 kilometers from the line, also tried to restart, but the mechanic could not cancel the automatic stop and informed the controller.
At 8:53 a.m., the collision occurred, derailing rail cars and shredding parts of the trains into pieces.
Independent investigators said their initial findings indicated that the RENFE train was traveling at a speed between 160 and 200 km/h (100-125 mph) when it hit the IRYO train.
What the minister says
Transport Minister Óscar Puente, who is under pressure to resign, called the controller’s decision to let one train restart at full speed while the other remains stopped as “inexplicable” and “erroneous”.
Puente said the RENFE train should never have been ordered to start running again since there was still an active stop signal on that line.
“An order was given for the train to restart, a wrong decision,” Puente told reporters. The decision “was taken in inexplicable circumstances given that a train was stopped and at a red light,” he said.
What the unions say
The unions, however, believe that the context is important.
Raquel Ayllón, a spokeswoman for SCF, Spain’s rail traffic controllers’ union, told The Associated Press that the workload is often too heavy for current staff to handle safely. She said traffic controllers have been calling for more staff for years as safety systems continue to fail.
“We think (the minister) is blaming a simple worker who was working in increasingly poor conditions,” she said. “Human error is not incomprehensible. What is incomprehensible is that the security system regularly fails.”
Spain’s railway engineers’ union, SEMAF, said it was not the first time that the three-decade-old LZB rail safety system, still in use on the Madrid-Seville line as it was being phased out, had gone offline and left human operators to fend for themselves.
“The LZB system should have been replaced some time ago,” said Diego Martín, spokesperson for SEMAF. “It failed us yesterday (Wednesday) and it has been taken offline several times in the past.”
Rail workers went on strike on Thursday in an action initially planned to demand that the government fulfill its commitments to improve safety conditions after the January accident.
Representatives of several unions also criticized what they called “irresponsible” Spanish media broadcasting of audio clips of conversations between the control room and the train’s mechanics. These recordings contain excerpts of apparently heated conversations between train engineers and traffic controllers in Madrid in the minutes before the accident.
Could privatization have overloaded the rail system?
Spanish Railways only served state-owned trains until it opened its high-speed rail to private operators in 2021.
The two collisions this year involved a train operated by RENFE and another operated by IRYO.
Rail traffic increased after the market was opened to competition. Between Madrid and Barcelona, for example, the average number of daily trips increased from 56 to 89 between 2019 and 2024, according to the SCF union.
Spanish railway workers’ union spokesperson Joan Rodríguez said the increase in traffic brought about by privatization was putting even more strain on the railways.
“We are not convinced that the liberalization of the high-speed passenger rail service has been accompanied by the necessary maintenance of the lines,” Rodríguez told TVE on Wednesday. “I’m not saying it was a determining factor (in the crashes), but yes, the increase in network usage is a factor to keep in mind.”
Gn world
