Spain’s deadly train crashes have damaged public confidence in the system

Pedro Sánchez and his socialist-led coalition government are racing to rebuild trust ahead of a snap election, but the task they face is immense

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A week ago today, for the second time in nine months, I got in my car and drove south from Madrid to cover a deadly train crash.

At 8.53am last Wednesday, a high-speed train operated by Spain’s state-owned rail company, Renfe, smashed into the back of a stationary train run by the private rail company Iryo, on the outskirts of the small town of Urda in Castilla-La Mancha. Sixty-nine people died in the accident, more than 100 were injured, and Spain’s already depleted confidence in its treasured rail network plummeted.

As I drove to Urda, I – along with much of Spain – was feeling a grim sense of deja vu. On 18 January, an Iryo train on the same line from Madrid to Seville had derailed near the Andalucían town of Adamuz before being struck by a Renfe train coming from the opposite direction. Forty-six people died, scores were injured and public trust in Spain’s trains was badly shaken.

The things I saw and heard in Urda mirrored those I’d seen and heard in Adamuz: local people rushing to the train tracks to help the injured; the rapid repurposing of municipal halls into emergency triage centres; and all manner of spontaneous acts of selflessness, bravery, practicality and compassion.

Some of the passengers whose journey south had come to a violent and premature end near Urda stood in line, many still with their wheelie cases and rucksacks, waiting for the coaches that had been chartered to take them onward. The queues looked almost normal until you noticed the odd bandaged head, torn trouser leg, or bloodstained top.

Josimar Medina, a young Peruvian who was travelling with his Brazilian girlfriend, Vitoria Maia, told me the blood on his brown T-shirt belonged to an American called Austin. Medina had helped free Austin from the wreckage and had managed to get him out of the train.

Although the young American was badly hurt, Medina had seen far worse injuries as he clambered off the train. “I saw … people missing limbs, and I saw one person who had nothing left below the chest,” he said. “I saw people with their heads crushed and people with mutilated arms.”

The shock and sorrow has echoed around Spain as the country tries to come to terms with what has happened, and to accept that its extensive and modern speed rail system – long a source of national pride – may not be the safe and reliable network it once seemed.

As the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, put it last week, “public trust in the high-speed system has been broken”.

Sánchez and his socialist-led coalition government are now racing to rebuild that trust, but the task they face is immense – especially given the current circumstances.

The anger and grief are still raw and, with a snap general election now less than a month away, the political atmosphere is explosive. The prime minister’s critics point out that 115 people died at Adamuz and Urda, and Sánchez and his ministers have had eight years to focus on, and invest in, rail safety. On Tuesday evening, the transport minister, Óscar Puente, accepted the inevitable, announcing his resignation, with the acknowledgment that “neither the country, nor I, can bear 100 deaths in less than a year”.