Spain’s high-speed rail network, the most extensive in Europe and the second largest in the world after China, has long ranked as a point of pride in the country. But Wednesday’s deadly crash – the second in nine months – has recast the spotlight on questions about safety.
Officials said at least 64 people were killed on Wednesday morning after two trains collided, leading to the derailment of several carriages. The two trains were carrying 544 passengers.
While the cause of the accident has yet to be confirmed, a source told Reuters that a train operated by the private company Iryo had come to a halt near the city of Toledo because of a signalling fault and on orders from infrastructure manager Adif. Soon after, a second train, operated by state-owned Renfe struck the stationary train. It had been travelling on the same line at a high speed.
Renfe said in a statement that its train had been instructed to continue on its way and had crashed into the stationary Iryo train “for reasons we don’t know”.
The accident follows a crash in January that killed 46 people and left dozens more injured near the town of Adamuz in Andalucía.
Media on Wednesday were swift to point to the parallels between the two crashes: both involved the same train operators and took place on the line connecting Madrid to the southern region of Andalusia, which is the oldest on Spain’s high-speed network.
The first crash sparked a wider conversation over safety on the line, a debate that rail unions say has continued.
Wednesday’s disaster came a day before a planned 24-hour work stoppage at Renfe by Spain’s largest train drivers union. “Our goal is to change the system and make it safer,” the union said earlier this month.
Their reasons for taking action ranged from the need for climate emergency protocols to ensuring channels of communication for workers to convey concerns. The union also called for guarantees that trains would be “reliable and safe”, adding: “We demand real and definitive technical solutions to the safety and reliability issues that have long plagued our rolling stock.”
It has also called a rolling, six-day strike for drivers at the high-speed rail operator Ouigo.
The January crash sparked a bout of political finger-pointing over whether Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party government had spent enough on railway maintenance in a country where travel by train accounts for about 57% of all transport.
Train travel grew by 40% from 2019 to 2024, coinciding with a period in which the country opened up its rail network to private companies. In the first half of this year, 25 million passengers used a high-speed train in Spain.
The government says it has increased spending on railway network maintenance by 54% since taking power in 2018.
Spain spends more than any other country on its high-speed network, averaging about €1.5bn (£1.26bn) a year from 2018 to 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of EU data. More than 90% of Spain’s train network is equipped with the highest level of safety control systems in the EU.
Much of the funding, however, has seemingly been directed at new infrastructure, with about 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades.
Data from the European Commission suggests Spain’s maintenance investment in its 4,000km (2,500 miles) of high-speed lines has lagged behind countries such as Germany or Switzerland although some of this could be attributed to differences in the age of the rail lines and the cost of public works and materials.
Until this year, Spain had among the lowest accident rates in the EU, with just one or fewer fatalities per thousand kilometres of track, according to data from Eurostat, the statistics arm of the EU.
Spain’s worst rail accident took place in 2013, when 80 people died after a train veered off a curved section of track outside the north-western city of Santiago de Compostela.
