At least 68 people were killed and about 80 injured when a high-speed train ploughed into the back of a stationary train in central Spain on Wednesday. The crash, just before 9am ( ) near Urda, a town south of Madrid, is Spain’s second deadly high-speed rail disaster in less than a year, and comes just weeks before national elections. The authorities have blamed an “inexplicable” order given by a rail control centre that allowed one of the trains to resume normal speed following a signalling failure.
The moving train was run by Renfe, Spain’s state-owned rail company. It hit the rear of a stalled train operated by Iryo, a private player which entered the country’s high-speed railway service market in 2022. Both trains were travelling from Madrid to Seville.
The Renfe train was carrying 397 people and the Iryo train 147, according to the government of Castilla-La Mancha, the central region where the crash happened. The trains collided on a raised section of track between Urda and the neighbouring town of Los Yebenes, near the ancient city of Toledo. Two of the Iryo train’s carriages derailed and fell down the embankment during the collision, regional officials and emergency sources quoted by Spanish newspaper El Pais said.
The toll is the highest in a European rail accident since a 2013 derailment in the northwestern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela killed 80 people. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited the site on Wednesday and declared three days of national mourning, starting on Thursday. He pledged to get to the bottom of the crash, saying any negligence would come to light and any system failures would be met with a strong response.
At least 68 people were killed in the crash and about 80 were injured, 50 of them seriously and 15 critically, said Emiliano Garcia-Page, president of the Castilla-La Mancha regional government. The most seriously injured people were taken to hospitals in the region and in Madrid, the capital. Others were assessed at a sports hall near the crash site, where emergency teams sorted them by the severity of their injuries before sending them home or to hospital.
Survivors treated near the scene had head wounds, facial swelling and bloodied clothing, and many were dazed, according to local media reports. Juan Quesada, 65, who was travelling on the Renfe train to Seville for work, suffered a head injury. A local who contributed to supplying the makeshift medical centre told the paper the scene was “like a horror movie”.
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