Is it still safe to travel by train in Europe?
The train crash near Urda, Spain on Wednesday was the country’s second train crash in 2026 – prompting further safety concerns over the country’s transport infrastructure.
LONDON – Investigators in Spain on Thursday focused on an automatic safety system and the role of train traffic controllers in the collision of two trains a day earlier that killed at least 69 people, authorities said.
Many of the dozens of people injured in the crash near the rural town of Urda remained hospitalized in serious condition on Thursday, officials said.
The crash Wednesday marked 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 collision in Adamuz in southern Spain killed 46 people.
The tragedies have generated ongoing concerns about rail infrastructure, despite safety reassurances from officials and rail experts.
Fulvio Lopane, assistant professor in transport planning at Northeastern University London, said two fatal high-speed accidents on the same line in a single year “demand full, transparent answers.”
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“Passengers have the right to be absolutely safe,” Lopane told Northeastern Global News. However, rail “remains one of the safest ways to travel in Europe.”
According to Spain’s transport minister Oscar Puente, the crash involved a computer communications malfunction and human error. He told reporters in Madrid on Wednesday that the trains rely on a computerized signaling system called LZB, which automatically halts a train if the line ahead is occupied. However, a computer malfunction at around 8:30 a.m. caused LZB to go down.
As a result, six trains were halted, including one operated by Iryo, a private company. It was stationary near the rural town of Urda. A 24-hour command center in Madrid mistakenly told the Renfe train, run by Spain’s state-owned railway, to continue its journey despite a red signal, causing it to strike the Iryo train. The impact knocked multiple carriages off the tracks, authorities said.
“It was the control center, through its operators, that made the decision to resume traffic, under circumstances that, from our point of view, are inexplicable,” Puente said. “Clearly, it was a wrong decision.”
Experts emphasize that statistics show traveling by train is safer than covering the same distance by car. According to European Commission data cited by the International Railway Safety Council, the risk of death for a train passenger in the EU is around 0.09 fatalities per billion kilometres, compared with 2.52 for car occupants and 36.41 for motorcyclists.
“Rail’s safety record has improved substantially over the long term,” Lopane said. “None of that is any comfort to the families in Spain, and it shouldn’t be used to minimise what happened. But the worst possible outcome would be people abandoning trains for cars: that would make them less safe, not more.”
The cause of Wednesday’s crash appears to differ from January’s crash, which was due to track defects. Lopane said he has concerns over European railway systems, although they’re about “keeping a safe system safe rather than a system that’s failing.”
“Regarding signaling, Europe still runs on a patchwork of national systems, and the move to a common European standard is behind schedule,” he said. “Without pre-empting the Spanish investigations, railways should be designed so that no single failure, technical or human, can become a catastrophe.”
Ka Ho Tsoi, assistant professor in transport planning at Northeastern University London, said Spain has Europe’s largest high-speed rail network and parts of it are decades old.
“Generally, serious rail accidents rarely come down to a single factor,” Tsoi told Northeastern Global News. “They often involve a mix of technical, human and organizational ones. A thorough review would look at measures on engineering, enforcement and education together.”
The impact knocked multiple carriages off the tracks. Combined, the trains were carrying 544 passengers, the officials said. At least 69 died and more than 100 were injured.
In January, a derailment and collision in Adamuz in southern Spain killed 46 people due to defects on the track – an incident that increased concern over faulty infrastructure. In 2013, a train derailment in Santiago de Compostela killed 78 people due to the driver speeding as it approached a curve in the tracks.
