At least 39 dead in Spain after two high-speed trains collide

At least 39 people died in southern Spain after a high-speed train derailed and collided with an oncoming one on Sunday night in one of the worst railway accidents in Europe in the past 80 years.

The accident near Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, about 360 km (223 miles) south of Madrid, also injured 122 people, with 12 in intensive care, according to emergency services.

“The train tipped to one side… then everything went dark, and all I heard was screams,” said Ana, a young woman travelling back to Madrid who was being treated at a Red Cross centre in Adamuz.

Limping and wrapped in a blanket, her face covered with plasters, she described how she was dragged from the train covered in blood by fellow passengers. Firefighters rescued her pregnant sister from the wreckage and an ambulance took them both to hospital.

“There were people who were fine and others who were very, very badly injured. You had them right in front of you and you knew they were going to die, and you couldn’t do anything,” she said.

REMOTE LOCATION COMPLICATES RESCUE

The rescue operation was complicated by the remote location of the crash in a hilly, olive-growing region. It could only be accessed by a single-track road, making it difficult for ambulances to enter and exit, Iñigo Vila, national emergency director at the Spanish Red Cross, told Reuters.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who cancelled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Transport Minister Oscar Puente were among those making their way to the crash site on Monday.

Police drone footage showed how the trains had come to a standstill 500 metres apart. The carriage of one train had been split in two, with one part crushed like a tin can.

Paqui, an Adamuz resident who with her husband rushed to help rescue survivors, described seeing body parts along the tracks between the two crash sites.

“(My husband) found a dead child inside, another child calling for his mother. You’re never ready to see something like this,” she said.

There were around 400 passengers on the two trains, according to statements by the two operators of the trains, Iryo and state-run Renfe’s Alvia.

Police said they had opened an office in Cordoba for relatives to provide DNA samples to help identify the dead.

The Iryo train, which was travelling at 110 kph, was en route from Malaga to Madrid when it derailed, Renfe President Álvaro Fernandez Heredia said on radio station Cadena Ser.

Twenty seconds later, the second train, heading to Huelva at 200 kph, either collided with the final two carriages of the Iryo train or with debris on the line, he said. The Iryo train had lost a wheel that has not yet been located.

It was too early to talk about the cause, but it happened in “strange conditions”, Fernandez Heredia said, adding that human error was virtually ruled out.

Problems with infrastructure on the line near Adamuz, from signalling failures to issues with overhead power lines, have caused delays to high-speed trains 10 times since 2022, according to a Reuters review of state-owned rail infrastructure administrator Adif’s X account.

The death toll is the highest from a train crash in Spain since 2013, when a train derailed in the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela and burst into flames, killing 80 people and injuring 145. It is among the top 20 deadliest in Europe in the past 80 years, according to Eurostat data.

Juan Barroso lost four family members and was desperately travelling from hospital to hospital and ringing the rail companies in search of answers.

He said that his cousin and her six-year-old daughter had been recovered, but others including his nephew were still missing, he told state broadcaster RTVE

TRACK RENOVATED LAST YEAR

The tragedy also stirs memories of the 2004 bomb attack on four trains headed to Madrid’s Atocha railway station, which killed nearly 200 people.

Spain has experienced a series of national emergencies in the past 18 months, including fatal floods in Valencia, a major power cut and the worst fire season in three decades

Puente said that the Iryo train was less than four years old and that the railway line near Adamuz had been completely renovated last May with an investment of 700 million euros ($813.5 million). Iryo said the train was last inspected on January 15.

Spain’s high-speed railway network has 3,622 km of tracks, according to Adif, making it the largest in Europe and the second-biggest in the world after China.

Around 10 million people used the high-speed railway connection between Madrid and Andalusia in 2024, according to competition authority CNMC.

The government was criticised last year for a series of delays on the network, caused by power outages and the theft of copper cables from the lines.

Spain opened up its high-speed rail network to private competition in 2020 in a bid to offer low-cost alternatives to Renfe’s Ave trains.

Iryo is a joint venture between Italian state railway operator Ferrovie dello Stato, airline Air Nostrum and Spanish infrastructure investment fund Globalvia. It began operating in November 2022.