One of the main lines of inquiry into the tragic crash near Toledo is the possibility that a technician from Adif, the state-owned company that manages rail infrastructure, failed to issue the necessary warning about the danger involving the two trains.
The death toll reported so far by Spanish media is 68. According to sources at Spain’s Transport Ministry cited by ABC, human error is the most likely cause of the accident. The suspicions relate to several mistakes made while intervening in the central signalling system.
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Initial assessments suggest that the Adif employee did not warn of the risk of a collision in time. At the critical moment, an Iryo train had stopped temporarily, while an AVE high-speed train was travelling on the same line.
Spain’s Transport Minister, Óscar Puente, said the safety system had failed and called it “inexplicable” that the AVE train was allowed to continue moving instead of the technical problem being resolved first. According to the minister, there was enough time to prevent the collision.
Puente said the system fault was identified at around 08:30, but permission to resume operations was granted six minutes later. Before colliding with the Iryo train, the AVE had travelled about 25 kilometres.
Other government sources told El País that the most likely cause was an error by an Adif operator who was trying to fix a problem with the main signalling system.
Rail traffic in Spain is managed automatically, but faults can make it necessary to switch to manual control. It is suspected that this happened on the morning of October 28, when signalling problems brought both trains to a halt.
During the switch from automatic to manual operation, mistakes are suspected to have been made and the required safety procedures not followed, creating the conditions that led to the fatal collision.
The authorities and railway companies involved have not yet published a final report on the causes. They say rescue operations and emergency management are the priority.
Adif has confirmed that two trains collided on the Madrid-Seville line: one operated by state-owned Renfe and the other by private operator Iryo.
The accident happened in Urda, in the province of Toledo, about 140 kilometres south of Madrid. Local media reported that 397 passengers were travelling on the Renfe train, while around 150 were on the Iryo train.
The incident has once again drawn attention to the safety of Spain’s rail network. Nick Kingsley, editor of Railway Gazette International, told Deutsche Welle that investigators must carefully determine how a situation arose in which two trains could end up facing the same danger.
Kingsley described the accident as “a black day for the Spanish rail industry” and warned that serious questions would be raised about how safety systems operate.
He said high-speed railways should have signalling and control systems designed to prevent collisions between trains.
The expert added that investigators would also examine whether the accident bears similarities to another fatal collision in Spain in January this year.
The exact cause of the tragedy near Toledo remains to be determined by the official investigation.
