Madrid, Spain – “I survived but the mental scars are still there all these years later. We must stop more accidents happening,” says Cristobal Gonalez. Gonzalez suffered multiple injuries when a high-speed train, which should have been travelling at 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour), hurtled off the line at 200km/h (125mph), killing 80 people.
The accident in 2013 at Angrois, near Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, remains Spain’s deadliest rail crash. On Wednesday, 13 years later, at least 69 people were killed when two trains collided near Urda, a town close to Toledo in central Spain. Only 10 months earlier, two other trains collided on the same line, in Adamuz near Cordoba in southern Spain, killing 46 people.
Survivors of Spain’s three worst rail disasters have said more must be done to avoid further tragedies. They will keep happening if we do not act,” Gonzalez told Al Jazeera. Whatever, we must stop these crashes happening by investing more in safety.” Gonzalez was travelling with a friend, Oscar, to Santiago de Compostela when the crash happened.
He was in the front carriage when the train “flew” off the tracks and smashed into a bank. He stayed inside the train trying to help others in their last moments. Years later, he struggles to talk about the events of that day.
It is very hard to share it, even if I wanted to – it is something that defies imagination,” said Gonzalez, who suffers from post-traumatic stress. Santiago Rosendo, who was one of the passengers in the Renfe train involved in the Adamuz crash in January, spoke of the “panic” among passengers when the trains collided. Then the train moved from side to side until the train slid onto its side and we were left entirely in the dark.
The first thing I saw when I got off the train was a body,” he told Al Jazeera. Rosendo, who was travelling on his own from Madrid to Huelva in southern Spain when the accident happened on a Sunday night, added: “I cannot believe that this has happened again on the same line. We have to do something.” An initial investigation into the Adamuz crash found a broken rail had caused one train to veer off the line into the path of an oncoming train.
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