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A high-speed passenger train rear-ended another in Spain on Wednesday morning near the central city of Toledo, killing at least 68 people and injuring dozens more, officials said, in one of the deadliest train crashes in Spanish history.
The accident happened after traffic control operators told a high-speed train to continue its journey when another train was stopped farther along the tracks, Spain’s transportation minister, Óscar Puente, said. He called the operators’ instruction “inexplicable.”
The deadly crash was the second this year involving the same two rail operators; the first, in January, killed 46 people. The latest accident, and its timing months after the previous crash, was likely to deepen doubts about the security of Spain’s once-vaunted rail system.
In Spanish news reports, passengers described an awful impact that tossed people from a dining car, broke limbs and piled passengers atop one another. People crawled out of windows and others were carried by fellow passengers into a nearby field on makeshift stretchers. Local workers, who had heard the crash, rushed to help and guide survivors to safety.
The crash came about a month ahead of national election in Spain, and it had the potential to become an issue in an already bitter campaign about the competence of the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Spain’s rail authority, the Adif, said the trains involved were a “Renfe train and another from the Iryo company,” both covering the route between Madrid, the capital, and the southern city of Seville. Renfe is the national rail provider.
Mr. Sánchez visited the scene of the crash, saying that Spanish rail’s security systems clearly needed to be reinforced. “If there has been negligence, it will come to light,” he said. “If there have been failures in the safety system, we will respond with the utmost firmness.” He declared three days of official mourning.
The conservative opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, voiced his own concern.
“I am very concerned about the information we are receiving regarding another train accident,” he wrote on social media soon after the crash. “The priority now is to assist the victims and support their families. My full support goes to the emergency teams working on the ground.” His Popular Party canceled all its campaign events around the country.
Here’s what else to know:
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Survivor speaks: A passenger on one of the trains described a routine trip, a sudden jolt and an effort to tend to the dead and injured. Read more ›
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An earlier deadly crash: In January, a northbound Iryo train derailed, two of its cars falling onto the opposite track, and a southbound Renfe train slammed into the carriages seconds later. An official report on what caused that lethal accident has not been released, but preliminary investigations pointed to a broken rail as the likely cause.
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A detailed account: In a news conference, Spain’s transportation minister described the events that he said preceded Wednesday’s crash. Read more ›
José Bautista contributed reporting from the scene of the crash.
A survivor of the crash describes a ‘twisted tangle of metal.’
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About half an hour after Fernando Seco’s train left Madrid on Wednesday morning, taking him home to Seville after a business trip, it stopped for a few minutes. A voice on the loudspeaker said there was heavy traffic.
The train then started to move again — and after a while, Mr. Seco said, there was a “very violent crash.” He would soon learn that his train, run by Renfe, Spain’s national rail provider, had rear-ended another one, leaving dozens of people dead. Mr. Seco, 62, felt the impact all the way at the back of the train, where he was sitting, he recalled in an interview. He said his carriage filled with screams and panic as people rushed to get off.
He and other passengers climbed down an embankment. Farmhands working in a nearby field, he said, cut through a fence so the passengers could pass through.
That was when Mr. Seco saw, further ahead, train carriages that had been completely derailed.
“A rail beam had pierced right through a carriage from bottom to top, like carving meat,” Mr. Seco said. He said he and others rushed to those carriages and found dead and injured people, “trapped in a twisted tangle of metal and wreckage.”
It was quiet, said Mr. Seco, who believed it was because people were so hurt that they couldn’t speak. He and others began working to free passengers from the wreckage. That was when the screaming started, he said.
He and the others moved at least a dozen people from the train, using parts of the wreckage as makeshift stretchers. Doctors who were among the passengers treated the wounded in what became a field hospital among a grove of almond trees.
When he finally left, Mr. Seco said, it was with the help of goatherds, who drove him to a sports pavilion in the nearby town of Urda. There, friends picked him up to drive him home to Seville.
The leader of Spain’s conservative opposition party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, demanded “answers” and urged the national government on Wednesday to conduct an independent review of the entire railway network.
“Spain has the right to know what is happening with its infrastructure, what condition the tracks and safety systems are in, what warnings were received from Adamuz and what measures were taken,” he said, referring to the fatal January train crash near the city of Adamuz and what lessons, if any, the authorities had learned from it.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that several U.S. citizens were among those injured in the crash. It did not provide information about their conditions.
Spain’s transportation minister said incorrect instructions from a control center led to the crash.
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Spain’s transportation minister said a train crash that killed dozens on Wednesday appeared to result from an “inexplicable” decision by traffic control operators to tell a high-speed train to continue its journey when another train was stopped farther along the tracks.
The minister, Óscar Puente, said he spent the morning watching a reconstruction of the accident and listening to audio recordings of communications between the control center in Madrid and the trains that crashed near Toledo, and he gave a detailed account of what he said preceded the crash at a news conference.
At about 8:30 a.m. local time, an automatic train control system near the site of the crash went down because of a computer failure, Mr. Puente said.
The system — known as the Linienzugbeeinflussung, or LZB — dates to the 1960s and uses external technologies, such as track circuits and axel counters, to monitor the speed and position of trains. This information allows the system to automatically calculate when and how quickly a train can safely move forward. It then changes railroad signals accordingly.
On Wednesday, the safety system was inactive along a stretch of about 39 miles, or 63 kilometers, of tracks, so six trains traveling along that section were automatically stopped as a precaution. At that point, he said, the control center in Madrid took over.
“The control center communicated with the trains that had stopped, and at 8:36 a.m., the decision was made to allow the train that eventually collided with the stationary Iryo train to resume its journey as normal,” Mr. Puente said, referring to the private rail operator of the stopped train.
Traffic controllers working for Adif, the state-owned company that manages Spain’s rail infrastructure, told the train that eventually rear-ended the other to restart its planned journey, Mr. Puente said, “despite there being another train ahead of it.”
The train that was hit from behind was believed to have received instructions from traffic operators to continue, he said, but for unknown reasons it did not proceed.
The moving train then hit the stationary train.
“And that is the origin of the accident that has taken place,” Mr. Puente said, adding that the moving train should have been stopped according to protocol.
The Madrid-Seville route is currently undergoing a modernization program that will replace the LZB system with the more modern European Rail Traffic Management System. Infrastructure officials hope that the new system will cut down on human error in signaling.
Mr. Puente also said that the driver of an uninvolved train tried to warn the control center of the dangers when its operators greenlit the rear train’s resumption of its journey. That driver told the control center operator that trains should proceed at lower-than-normal speeds. The operator, Mr. Puente said, acknowledged his error. “Oh, yes,” the operator replied.
K. R. Callaway contributed reporting.
José Bautista
Reporting from the scene
When the crash happened, Yahadi Mohamed Maulud, 41, who lives in the nearby town of Yébenes, loaded his car with water bottles and rushed to help. “We found a massacre,” he said, describing torn limbs and a blood-covered woman searching for her brother. One of the first to arrive at the scene, he helped to move injured passengers and carry stretchers. Maulud said he often took the train himself to Madrid for business, but no more. “I’m never getting on that train again.”
So many people showed up at Madrid hospitals on Wednesday to donate blood for victims of the train crash that the authorities are asking citizens to wait until Thursday or the following days, when more donations will be needed.
“The response from the people of Madrid to the call for blood donations is overwhelming,” said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid’s regional president. “Thank you, everyone.”
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez spoke from the scene of the crash on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s not possible for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed train accidents in one year,” he said, adding that while today’s accident and a fatal January crash on the same line seemed unrelated, Spanish rail’s security systems clearly needed to be reinforced.
“If there has been negligence, it will come to light,” he said. “If there have been failures in the safety system, we will respond with the utmost firmness.” Spain needs to understand “what is the origin of this tragedy,” he said.
Sánchez offered his condolences to the families of victims and thanked emergency workers. He also declared three days of official mourning, as he did after the January crash.
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Emiliano García-Page, the president of the Castilla-La Mancha region, said the death toll from the crash had risen to 68. Twenty-four of those killed were on the Renfe train and the others were on the Iryo train, he said.
“Firefighters, with the help of cranes, are still working to determine whether there are more fatalities,” he said, “possibly beneath some of the carriages or among the twisted wreckage they have become.”
José Bautista
Reporting from the scene
In the middle of fields of alfalfa and almond trees, a seemingly endless procession of ambulances, police cars and firetrucks drove in and out of the crash scene, as rescue helicopters flew low overhead. The trains seemed twisted together, a mass of mangled metal.
Dozens of Civil Guard officers, some wearing the white protective suits used by forensic investigators, were inspecting the scene and gathering evidence. Broken cables and fallen utility poles were scattered all around.
A group of Catholic priests walked out from the area where the trains were located. “We came to pray for the dead,” said the Rev. Luis Lucendo, 63, a vicar of Toledo and parish priest in Villacañas, a nearby town.
“One man told us that his wife had died, and I was able to make the sign of the cross over her,” Father Lucendo said. “They were going to spend the day in Córdoba, but this is where their journey ended.”
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At least 64 people were killed in the train crash, the emergency services of Castilla-La Mancha said on Wednesday afternoon. The toll makes the accident one of the deadliest in the country’s history.
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Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is traveling to Urda to offer support to first responders and express his support to the families of victims, his government said.
The president of Castilla-La Mancha region, Emiliano García-Page, confirmed that at least 30 people had been killed in the train crash, a number that may rise. About 80 people were injured, 50 of them, according to García-Page, with severe injuries.
Blood donation groups in the area of the train crash are urging donors to come to hospitals in Toledo and Ciudad Real to “urgently replenish the reserves. Blood of all types will be needed.”
The crash comes months after a fatal accident involving the same train operators.
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The fatal train crash near Toledo on Wednesday comes months after a deadly collision in southern Spain that involved the same carriers. In that accident, in January, 46 people were killed when two high-speed trains collided near Adamuz, in the country’s worst rail disaster since 2013.
The crash in January occurred when a train belonging to the private company Iryo derailed as it traveled toward Madrid. The train had been traveling north from Málaga when two of its rear cars fell into the opposite track. Seconds later, a southbound train operated by Spain’s national rail company, Renfe, slammed into the carriages.
The two trains were carrying hundreds of people when the collision occurred. An official report on what caused that accident is not yet available, but preliminary investigations pointed to a broken rail as the likely cause.
The accident shocked Spain and led to deep uncertainty about the safety of the country’s rail system, which contains the world’s second-longest high-speed rail network.
The deadly crash on Wednesday was the third in Spain this year. Days after the accident in January, a commuter train near Barcelona struck a collapsed retaining wall and derailed, killing one person.
Videos shot by passengers after the crash show parts of the derailed carriages pulverized, with charred wheels, and bags and seats strewn across an embankment. Emergency workers tend to the injured or hover over people covered in Mylar blankets. The arid field outside the small towns of Los Yébenes and Urda has become a parking lot of emergency vehicles and tents.
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Video filmed inside one of the trains and verified by The New York Times shows smoke rising from a charred, mangled carriage on the slope of the rail line. The footage was first shared by the Spanish radio station Capital Radio, which said an employee had been on one of the trains at the time of the crash.
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The first eyewitness reports from the crash are beginning to trickle in on Spanish media. Passengers are describing an awful impact that tossed people from the dining car, broke limbs and piled passengers atop one another. Passengers crawled out of windows and lay in in a nearby field, where local workers, who heard the crash, rushed to help them with first aid kits and saw the first bodies.
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The crash comes months after a deadly collision in January in southern Spain that involved the same carriers. That accident, in which two high-speed trains collided, killing 46 people, was the country’s worst railway disaster since 2013.
An official report on what caused the January crash is not yet available, but preliminary investigations pointed to a broken rail as the likely cause.
Spain’s interior ministry said in a statement that it was deploying a military emergency unit and Civil Guard officers to the scene of the crash in the province of Toledo. Investigators from Spain’s Major Disaster Unit are also en route.