Spain's latest deadly train crash puts human error and systemic failure under scrutiny

Was Spain’s second major train collision this year caused by human error or failures in its once touted high-speed rail network?

It depends on whom you ask.

Spain’s transport minister was quick to lay most of the blame on a traffic controller’s poor judgment for Wednesday’s collision in Toledo province, which killed 69 people.

But railway unions are pushing back. They point instead to what they describe as deteriorating working conditions — fewer traffic controllers with more work than ever — that have made it increasingly difficult to ensure the safety of 45 million passengers annually.

A judge and a special government commission are conducting separate investigations into the deadly crash, while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has pledged to get to the bottom of it.

Police with sniffer dogs were still sifting through the wreckage on Friday morning.

Investigators from a special committee for rail accidents removed the trains’ black boxes late on Thursday and handed them over to the Civil Guard for inspection.

“This investigation must determine how and why this catastrophe happened,” Spain’s King Felipe VI said on Thursday after visiting injured passengers in a Toledo hospital. “We will have to take measures so this never happens again.”

It was the second major crash on the Madrid-Seville line this year. In January, over two hours farther south, one train jumped the track and hit another going in the opposite direction, killing 46 people.

Spain’s high-speed rail network has been considered a success of state industrial policy. It is the world’s second-largest, after China’s. Until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service over three decades ago.

The timeline of the catastrophe given by the government

The chain of events that ended in disaster started at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, when the communication system key to the functioning of the line’s security system went down. The system, called LZB, monitors the position of trains and can automatically apply their brakes to prevent a collision.

That malfunction meant that traffic controllers based at a control post in Madrid took over full responsibility for monitoring the positions and safety of the trains on a stretch of 63 kilometers (39 miles) between Madrid and Seville. At that time authorities believe there were six trains on the affected stretch of track.

At 8:36, a controller told one train, belonging to state-owned RENFE, that it could start running again at normal speed. The other train, operated by privately owned IRYO and located 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) down the line, also tried to restart, but the engineer was unable to override the automatic stop and informed the controller.

At 8:53 the collision occurred, derailing carriages and shredding parts of the trains to bits.

The independent investigators said their initial findings indicated that the RENFE train was moving at between 160 and 200 kph (100-125 mph) when it struck 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 remained stationary “inexplicable” and “erroneous.”

Puente said that the RENFE train should never have been told to start moving again since there was still a stop signal active on that line.

“An order is given for the train to restart, an erroneous decision,” Puente told reporters. The decision “was taken in inexplicable circumstances given that a train was stopped and with a red light,” he said.

What the unions say

Unions, however, argue that the context matters.

Raquel Ayllón, spokesperson for SCF, Spain’s railway traffic controllers union, told The Associated Press that the workload is regularly too much for the current staff to safely handle. She said that traffic controllers have been asking for more personnel for years, while the safety systems keep failing.

“We believe (the minister) is blaming a mere worker who was working under increasingly poor conditions,” she said. “Human error isn’t incomprehensible. What is incomprehensible is that the safety system is regularly failing.”

Spain’s union for train engineers, SEMAF, said that this was not the first time the 3-decade-old LZB train security system, which is still in use on the Madrid-Seville line while 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 of the SEMAF. “It failed us yesterday (Wednesday) and it has gone offline on repeated occasions in the past.”

Train workers went on strike Thursday in a previously planned action to demand the government fulfill its commitments to improve safety conditions after the January crash.

Representatives from several unions also criticized what they called the “irresponsible” leak of audio clips of conversations between the control room and the train engineers to Spanish media. Those recordings contain snippets of apparently hectic conversations between the engineers on the trains and the traffic controllers in Madrid in the minutes before the accident.

Could privatization have overloaded the rail system?

Spain’s railways only serviced state-owned trains until it opened its high-speed rail to private operators in 2021.

Both of this year’s collisions involved a train operated by RENFE and one operated by IRYO.

Rail traffic increased after the market was opened to competition. Between Madrid and Barcelona, for instance, the average number of daily trips increased from 56 to 89 between 2019 and 2024, according to the SCF union.

A spokesperson for Spain’s train workers’ union, Joan Rodríguez, said increased traffic brought by privatization has put extra strain on railways.

“We are not convinced that the liberalization of the high-speed passenger rail service was matched by the necessary upkeep of the lines,” Rodríguez told TVE on Wednesday. “I am not saying it was a determining factor (in the crashes), but yes, the increase in use of the network is a factor to keep in mind.”