Spain train crash: At least 30 dead in high-speed rail crash in Urda near Madrid
Updated ,first published
London: Two trains have collided on a high-speed line in central Spain in a crash that has killed at least 64 people and injured dozens of others.
One train crashed into the rear of the other just after 9am local time on the line south of Madrid, forcing at least three carriages off the tracks and down an embankment.
One passenger told Spanish newspaper El Mundo the scene was “apocalyptic” because of the scale of the destruction, as medics removed bodies from the smashed carriages.
The greatest damage appeared to be to the rear three carriages of an Iryo train travelling south, which was rammed from behind by a Renfe AVE train also heading south from Madrid.
“It’s hard to imagine anyone is still alive in those three cars,” passenger Sebastián Herrero, a 46-year-old from Seville, told El Mundo. “It’s just a twisted mass of metal. It’s as if a bomb had gone off.”
Herrero told the newspaper he was travelling in car 7 of the Iryo train that had departed Madrid for the south. Of the nine carriages, he said, four or five were derailed when the Renfe AVE crashed into the Iryo train.
“It’s a perfectly straight stretch of track,” he said. “It’s impossible to understand how there was no warning.”
Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said that the accident was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command centre for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed. He said the train engineers were not to blame.
Puente said that at 8:30am the security system on a stretch of 63 kilometres stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. But the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it ended up colliding with the stopped IRYO train at 8:53am.
Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since there was still a “stop signal” active that line. And if it had, at least it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Puente said they were still studying information to see how fast the train was going, but it could have been at 200km/h for that stretch of the track.
“I am not attributing responsibility to anyone, I am just stating the facts,” Puente said.
Passenger, Jesús Jerónimo, 54, told newspaper El Pais that he was travelling in car 2 of the Renfe AVE service heading south to Seville. “I felt a really brutal acceleration and I slammed into the seat in front of me,” he said.
Early reports indicate the Renfe AVE train had 397 passengers and the Iryo had 147 passengers.
While early reports put the death toll at 10 and then 30 people, the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha later said there at least 64 dead. The update was issued shortly before 2pm on Wednesday (just before midnight in Australia). The president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, said more than 80 people were injured, 50 of them seriously.
A young woman on the Iryo train, Eduarda, told news outlet Cadena Ser that some passengers had been trapped beneath the trains.
“There were many people screaming because they couldn’t get out – it was horrific,” she said.
She told the news outlet, in an account also published by El Espanol, that the Iryo train she was on was in motion at the time of the crash.
Spanish media reported that the Iryo train had sent an alert to the rail control centre saying it was stopped due to a failure of the LZB track signalling system, leading to speculation it was at a standstill when struck by the Renfe AVE train.
Spain’s rail system operator ADIF said the crash occurred on Wednesday morning in the province of Toledo. Rail service was suspended between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia.
The Castilla La Mancha regional government confirmed the death toll had risen to 30 people, after an earlier warning by spokeswoman Esther Padilla that the “number will surely rise”.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on X that he was “shocked” by the “serious train accident”.
“Emergency services are working on the ground to assist those affected and ensure their safety, in coordination with all the involved administrations,” he wrote.
“My affection, solidarity and support to all the victims and their families.”
The collision comes nine months after an accident between high-speed trains belonging to the same operators on the same line.
In January, 45 people died in southern Spain when a train jumped the track and hit an oncoming train. The crash was the deadliest in Spain since a 2013 crash that killed 80 people.
The crash on Wednesday could be worse than the January tragedy, El Pais reported.
“The government confirms that there are many dead in the train accident and points to human error,” the newspaper said.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has clashed at times with Sanchez on migration policy, sent a message of sympathy to Spain.
“In these such difficult hours, the Italian Government is close to Spain and the Spanish people for the dramatic railway accident that occurred near Toledo,” she wrote on X.
“My thoughts and those of our entire government go to the families of the victims, to the injured, and to all those who are working tirelessly in the rescue operations.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were among the other world leaders to post tributes to the victims on X.
More to come
With AP, Reuters
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
