By Nina Lopez and Michael Francis Gore
ADAMUZ, Spain, Jan 19 (Reuters) – 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 happened near Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, about 223 miles south of the capital Madrid. It left 122 people injured, with 48 still in hospital and 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 who was travelling back to Madrid and was being treated at a Red Cross center in Adamuz.
Limping and wrapped in a blanket, her face covered with plasters, she described how she was dragged out of the train covered in blood through a window by other passengers who had escaped. Firefighters rescued her 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.
COMPLICATED RESCUE OPERATION
The rescue operation was complicated by the remote location of the crash, which 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 and Transport Minister Oscar Puente were among those making their way to the crash site on Monday morning. Sanchez cancelled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland after the accident.
“The death toll has risen to 39 and is not yet definitive,” Puente said on X.
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.
The Civil Guard said it 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, while the second train was heading towards Huelva at 200 kph.
It was too early to talk about the cause, but it happened in “strange conditions”, Renfe President Álvaro Fernandez Heredia said on local radio station Cadena Ser, adding that “human error is practically ruled out.”
The Alvia train either collided with the final two carriages of the Iryo train that derailed, or with debris on the line, Heredia said. The Iryo train had lost a wheel that has not yet been located.
The collision happened about 20 seconds after the derailment, so there was no time to activate an emergency brake, he said.
Problems with infrastructure at Adamuz, from signaling failures to issues with overhead power lines, have caused delays to high-speed trains between Madrid and Andalusia 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’s among the top 20 deadliest in Europe in the past 80 years, according to Eurostat data.
TRACK WAS RENOVATED LAST YEAR
Puente said that the Iryo train was less than four years old and that the railway track 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 criticized last year for a series of delays on the network, caused by power outages and the theft of copper cables from the lines. The network is vulnerable to cable thefts as it crosses large swathes of empty countryside.
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.
Iryo’s train was a Frecciarossa 1000, state train operator Trenitalia’s flagship high-speed train, which began operating in 2015 and can reach speeds of up to 400 kph, according to Trenitalia.
($1 = 0.8604 euros)
(Reporting by Nina Lopez, Michael Gore, Leonardo Benassatto, Susana Vera, Emma Pinedo and Victoria Waldersee; Writing by Charlie Devereux; Editing by David Latona and Sharon Singleton)
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