Spain Rail Minister Defies Resignation Calls After Second Collision in Nine Months

Two trains bound for Andalucía collided just before 9am on Wednesday near Urda, in Castilla-La Mancha, killing at least 69 people and injuring more than 100. One train, operated by state-owned Renfe, struck the rear of an Iryo train that had come to a halt, knocking several carriages off the track. Victims include people from at least 23 foreign countries.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Friday that trust in high-speed rail has been broken. He said his government is committed to determining what caused the country's second fatal train collision this year. "It's unacceptable for a country like Spain - which has such a powerful high-speed rail system - to experience two accidents of this nature and magnitude within a single year," Sánchez said.

Nine months ago, 46 people died and dozens were injured when a Renfe train and an Iryo train collided on the same line near Adamuz, in Andalucía. That crash also involved one train from each operator.

Transport Minister Óscar Puente, facing calls to resign, said Friday he would not discuss his job status. "My duty now isn't to talk about whether or not I carry on with my job; it's to solve the problems, clarify what happened and offer clear explanations," Puente said. He pointed to Spain's state infrastructure operator Adif and its Madrid control centre. Puente said the LZB signalling system, which halts a train when the line ahead is occupied, had gone down before the crash, and that control then reverted to human operators.

Puente said an Adif operator directed the Renfe train to proceed at normal speed rather than the 40kph (25mph) limit that protocols require when signalling is down. A preliminary investigation report released Thursday said the Renfe train was travelling between 160kph and 200kph when it struck the Iryo train. The report concluded: "The sequence of malfunctions, instructions, and actions eventually led to the collision, in the absence of the necessary mitigating barriers." The operator was a 48-year-old man with training and two years of control centre experience who had managed the sector since February.

Rail unions said workloads are too heavy for safe operations and called for more staff. Raquel Ayllón, a spokesperson for SCF, the railway traffic controllers union, told the Associated Press: "We believe [the minister] is blaming a mere worker who was working under increasingly poor conditions. Human error isn't incomprehensible. What is incomprehensible is that the safety system is regularly failing."

The conservative People's party has called for Puente to step down. Its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said the party holds Puente and Sánchez politically responsible for both crashes. Ada Colau, who leads the leftwing Frente Amplio coalition, also said Puente must go. Snap general elections are scheduled for next month. Puente said he had given the crash's effect on the campaign "zero thought".