With the death toll confirmed from Spain’s worst train accident in more than a decade, the country is now grappling with a crisis of confidence in its rail system.
A high-speed train derailed on Sunday night on a stretch of straight track in southern Spain, causing a collision with an oncoming train, which also came off the rails. On Friday, after rescue workers had spent days recovering bodies from the wreckage of both trains, it was confirmed that 45 people had died.
“This is the moment to cry,” said the president of the southern Andalusia region, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, in a homage to those who had died. “The pain we feel is our greatest tribute.”
The investigation into the tragedy is still under way. Rail authorities and the government appear to have ruled out human error or sabotage and investigators are focusing on the train that derailed and the stretch of track where it did so.
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It has emerged that a piece of the track was damaged before the accident, meaning it could potentially have caused the derailment.
The accident – the worst since 80 people died in a derailment near Santiago de Compostela in 2013 – has placed the high-speed rail network and the investment it receives under intense scrutiny.
Transport minister Óscar Puente has insisted that lack of maintenance or investment was not a factor in the crash. He has defended the Socialist-led government’s record in this area and pointed to €700 million spent to update the route between Madrid and southern Spain in recent years.
Spain’s high-speed network is Europe’s largest and has long been among the country’s most celebrated infrastructure projects. However, recent years have seen an increase in technical issues, delays and cancellations on a number of routes, a development which many social media users have backed up in recent days with personal testimonies of late arrivals and rattling carriages.
The liberalisation of the high-speed network in 2020 – allowing France’s Ouigo and Italy’s Iryo to operate services alongside Spain’s Renfe – has increased the number of trains and passengers enormously. Nearly 22 million people travelled on Renfe’s high-speed trains last year, about double the number before the arrival of the private firms. In addition, lines have been extended and new routes built in recent years.
All of this has put pressure on the high-speed system, making its maintenance increasingly costly.
Another rail accident, on Catalonia’s regional service, killed a trainee driver and injured several dozen others on Tuesday when a wall collapsed on to the line near Barcelona, adding to the sense of crisis. The same day, a rock fell on to the line causing several injuries in another local train in Catalonia.
Local rail services in the region were halted on Wednesday and Thursday, affecting 400,000 Catalans, as the authorities checked lines and then drivers refused to return to work without improved safety guarantees. A drivers’ union, citing risks posed by “the constant deterioration” of the rail system has scheduled a nationwide strike for three days in February.
Most recently, on Thursday, a Renfe commuter service in the south of Spain was struck by crane arm encroaching on railway property and on to the path of the train. No one was killed but six people sustained minor injuries in the collision near the city of Cartagena in the Murcia region.
The fallout from the incidents of the last week has entered the political sphere, with the opposition accusing the government of a lack of transparency regarding the investigation.
The far-right Vox party has said it is not safe to travel by train in Spain and has said it will boycott a state memorial service in Huelva for the victims of the high-speed accident on January 31st, in protest at the government’s handling of the tragedy.
The leader of the conservative People’s Party (PP), Alberto Núnez Feijóo, linked the crash to the government’s handling of public services.
“The state of our railway lines reflects the state of the nation,” he said.
