What is known about the collision of two high-speed trains in Spain that left dozens dead

What is known about the collision of two high-speed trains in Spain that left tens of thousands dead - Author, Norberto Paredes and Cristina J. Orgaz - Author's Title, BBC News Mundo - Publication Date - Reading Time: 6 min Two high-speed trains collided on Wednesday morning near the town of Urda, south of Madrid. The collision involved a train operated by the state-owned company Renfe that had left the Spanish capital for Seville, and a train from the private company Iryo that covered the same route and was stopped on the tracks. The accident occurred about 140 km south of Madrid, in the vicinity of Urda, in the province of Toledo, at 8:54 local time. The Spanish government confirmed that the number of fatalities in the accident amounts to at least 69. "All of Spain is in mourning," said the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, who conveyed "all solidarity and empathy" to the victims. This figure makes it the most serious rail tragedy in Spain since July 2013, when 80 people died when a high-speed train derailed on a curve outside of Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest of the country. Emergency services are currently working against the clock to attend to the injured and search for survivors. The rail company Renfe reported that services between Madrid, Ciudad Real, and Andalusia have been suspended. What happened and what is known about the cause of the collision The accident occurred when the Renfe high-speed train rear-ended the Iryo train. It has not been specified at what speed the Renfe convoy was traveling, but on the section of the accident the trains can reach 200 km/h under normal conditions. According to Adif data, transmitted to TVE by Esther Padilla, spokesperson for the government of Castilla-La Mancha, at the time of the collision, there were 544 people on board the two accidented trains. The Iryo train (service 6076) was carrying 147 people (146 adults and a baby). The Renfe train (service 2080) was carrying 397 passengers. The impact caused at least two carriages to fall onto an embankment. Renfe is the state railway company of Spain, while Iryo is a private operator of high-speed trains (whose majority owner is the Italian railway company Trenitalia). Eduarda, a 17-year-old who was traveling on one of the trains, told the Cadena SER radio station that there was "chaos" in the place and that she had seen victims under the trains. "I was calm, with my two cats beside me, and there was a very big brake and I went forward with the seat. People started to come out, there were people crying, people dead under the trains could be seen everywhere," she recounted. "A lot of people who could not get out, screams... horror." Rafael Barceló, another passenger, told the Reuters agency that he was in the train's cafeteria and that this saved him and a friend. "We were having breakfast, drinking coffee, and we felt a very strong impact. We all got thrown out. I am reasonably well. My companion is much worse," he told the Reuters agency. Their seats were in carriage number 7, "which is where the most victims have been and it is the most destroyed," he assured. "I have counted at least 8 victims in that car." What the authorities have said The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, traveled to the accident site. "The judicial authorities are doing their work to find out the causes, the origin, the why, and we will get to the end, and if there have been negligence, it will be known, and if there have been failures in the safety system, it will be answered with full force," he said. "It is clear that we have suffered two terrible tragedies in the same year in high-speed travel. Most likely, everything indicates that the origin of the accidents has nothing to do with each other, but that is not for me to say." And he added: "But what is clear is that we have to reform safety to rebuild confidence in our rail system. What is not assumable is to suffer two accidents in the same year." For his part, King Felipe VI offered his condolences to the families of the victims. "First, we must mourn this terrible misfortune, convey to the families our sympathy, our sadness, our support, our affection, at such a hard, such a difficult time," he declared. "Words of encouragement, support, and recognition to all the emergency services that are attending to the situation," he added. The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, explained in a press conference that the origin of the accident was the control center. According to Puente, the automated system called LZB, which manages rail traffic in the area, stopped working at 8:30, local time, due to "a communication failure between the network computers," which caused the automatic stopping of the trains traveling on the affected section, including the two that ended up colliding. With the system down, the Atocha Control Center took command of the affected section, about 69 km long, and around 8:36 authorized the Renfe train to resume its journey "normally". The minister described the decision as "unexplainable" and pointed out that "according to both the regulations and the Adif protocols themselves, it could not resume the journey normally because the track circuit was occupied by the Iryo train stopped at the station entrance, in addition to a red signal that prevented resuming the journey." The minister said he does not attribute the events to anyone and that "the investigation must draw the conclusions." Several agents of the Civil Guard and technicians from the Commission for the Investigation of Railway Accidents (CIAF) interviewed the operator of the control center that regulated traffic on the Madrid-Seville AVE line at the time the accident occurred between the two trains. Officials from the Civil Guard, firefighters from the provincial consortia of Toledo and Ciudad Real, volunteers from Civil Protection, and health teams from the Health Service of Castilla-La Mancha also went to the accident site. For their part, the government of the Community of Madrid has activated the public hospitals of La Paz, Getafe, and 12 de Octubre to attend to the injured in the rail accident, according to official sources. This accident in the province of Toledo is added to other two railway accidents that have occurred in Spain so far this year. The most serious one took place on January 18 in Andalusia, when the collision of two high-speed trains left 45 dead and more than 100 injured. Two days later, another accident in Catalonia caused the death of a driver in training. The commuter train he was traveling in collided with a wall that had collapsed over the tracks. - Download the new BBC World Service app. Choose BBC News Mundo and receive news alerts, documentaries and analysis, all in one place. Important: the new application is not available in the United Kingdom or the United States. - You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X and on our WhatsApp channel. - And don't forget to subscribe here to our newsletter to receive a special selection of our best content every Friday.