As many as four systems failed before a fatal train crash in Spain that killed 69 people, an investigation has found.
The crash – the second such incident in a year following a high-speed collision in January – occurred on Wednesday (local time) when two trains heading from Madrid to Andalucia crashed into each other.
The state-owned Renfe train crashed into a privately owned Iryo train in Urda, south of Toledo, after the driver had been wrongly informed that the track was clear.
Among the dead were Fatima Banez, 59, Spain’s former Minister of Employment and Minister of Social Security, and Julieta Gallego, a 24-year-old athlete.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced three days of mourning following the catastrophe, in which about 50 people were also injured.
But critics and political opponents blamed his Administration for underinvesting in railway infrastructure, pointing to the crash earlier this year in which 46 people were killed.
The first report of the incident this week, which detailed the damage seen by operators when they arrived on scene, reportedly revealed a number of technical problems with the railway infrastructure that day.
The report by Adif, which manages Spain’s railway infrastructure, shows that the main failure was a failure at Urda in the LZB security system, which ensures two trains do not collide.
The report said the LZB control centre suffered a widespread failure, forcing operators to enact safety protocols, such as temporary speed limits.
There were also faults in communication systems and electrical disturbances on the track bed.
Transport Minister Oscar Puente said the LZB system had stopped working 170 times in the last year, although he called that “normal” and around the EU average.
“We still don’t know what caused the communication problem between the computer systems at the Urda exchange,” Puente said during a press conference on Friday (local time).
“What we do know is that this incident is not uncommon and that the system is designed to handle it.”
Puente, who has ruled out resigning, despite calls for him to step down, said a controller instructed a stalled train to restart and cleared it to set off at speeds of up to 160km/h even though a second train was stationary up ahead.
He did not mention the other faults listed in the report.
In this case, reactivating the system – during which time the operators used incorrect protocols – proved disastrous: the Renfe train headed at a speed of up to 200km/h towards the stationary Iryo train.
Sanchez’s Government has sought to highlight human error as a reason for the disaster.
But Isabel Pardo de Vera, the former president of Adif, said the Government had failed to update ageing systems.
“Line renewal had been planned for a long time,” she said in an interview on Thursday (local time). But after she had moved on from the position and eventually left the Government, she was surprised, she said, to discover this year that the enhanced system still “wasn’t implemented”.
Pardo de Vera, who left the Government in 2023 and is under investigation over accusations of corruption in handling unrelated public contracts, which she denies, said the Government had failed in its “maintenance, or construction, or operations, or traffic management”.
“What they have done to safety, that is the root problem,” she said.
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