What do we know about the Spanish train crash?
Here’s what we know about the deadly train crash in Spain on Wednesday morning.
At least 68 people died and dozens were injured in a train crash south of the Spanish capital of Madrid, in what local authorities said was the country’s worst disaster in more than a decade.
The collision of the two high-speed trains occurred just after 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday, near the rural town of Urda, when one moving train hit the back of another that was stationary, according to a statement issued by officials in the Castilla-La Mancha region, where Urda is located. The impact knocked multiple carriages off the tracks, authorities said.
One train was run by Spain’s state-owned railway company Renfe; the other by Iryo, a private operator. Combined, they were carrying 544 passengers.
Spain’s transport minister Oscar Puente told reporters in Madrid that the crash occurred due to a computer communications malfunction and human error. The Renfe train was mistakenly authorized to continue its journey despite a red signal, he said. The exact cause of the crash is under investigation.
Wednesday’s accident marks the fourth-deadliest train crash ever recorded in Spain and the second major train accident in the country this year. In January, a derailment and collusion in Adamuz in southern Spain killed 46 people. In 2013, authorities attributed a train derailment in Santiago de Compostela to fault on the rail – an incident that increased concern over faulty infrastructure.
Nathan David Obeng-Amoako, a PhD candidate in transportation engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, said it was “too early” to say whether Wednesday’s collision and the one that occurred in January share a cause.
“Spain has the largest high-speed rail network in Europe and a strong safety record, so two fatal crashes in one year deserve a serious look,” he told Northeastern Global News.
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He explained that the preliminary findings from Adamuz pointed to a fractured rail at a weld, “which is a question of track inspection and maintenance,” he said. “From what the transport minister has described at Urda, a train [was] allowed to restart and travel about 25 kilometres [15 miles] before reaching a stopped train, points instead to signalling and train control. Those are different systems, maintained and checked in different ways.”
Authorities in Castilla-La Mancha said emergency services had been deployed to sort through the wreckage and provide medical care to injured passengers. Rail services between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia were suspended, authorities said.
In a translated post on X, the Spanish government said the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was travelling to the area to support the work of emergency teams.
“The priority is to attend to the victims and ensure the maximum coordination between administrations,” the post said.
Sánchez said on X that he was shocked by the accident and offered his “|affection, solidarity, and support to all the victims and their families.”
With almost 60 people injured, authorities said the death toll was expected to rise.
“It was a high-speed impact, so we are expecting this to be a tragedy,” Spanish Health Minister Mónica García told Spanish news media.
