At least 39 dead in Spain train collision

ADAMUZ: At least 39 people have died after a high-speed train derailed and collided with an oncoming train on Sunday night in southern Spain, one of the deadliest railway accidents in Europe in the past eight decades.

The accident occurred near Adamuz in Cordoba province, roughly 360 kilometres south of Madrid, leaving 122 people injured, of whom 48 remain hospitalised and 12 are in intensive care, emergency services said.

Ana, a passenger returning to Madrid, described the chaos. “The train tipped to one side… then everything went dark, and all I heard was screams,” she said. Covered in blood and plasters, she recalled being pulled out through a window by other passengers, while firefighters rescued her sister.

“There were people who were fine and others who were very badly injured. You knew they were going to die, and you couldn’t do anything,” she said.

The rescue operation was complicated by the remote location, accessible only via a single-track road, hampering ambulance access, Iñigo Vila, national emergency director at the Spanish Red Cross, told HUM News.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Transport Minister Oscar Puente visited the site on Monday. Sanchez cancelled a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos following the accident.

“There were around 400 passengers on the two trains,” operators Iryo and state-run Renfe said. The Iryo train, travelling at 110 kph, was bound for Madrid from Malaga, while the second train was heading towards Huelva at 200 kph.

The collision happened about 20 seconds after the derailment, leaving no time to activate an emergency brake, Renfe President Álvaro Fernandez Heredia said. The Iryo train had lost a wheel that has not yet been recovered. Heredia added that human error was “practically ruled out” and that the incident occurred under “strange conditions.”

Infrastructure issues at Adamuz, including signalling failures and overhead power line problems, have caused delays to high-speed trains between Madrid and Andalusia 10 times since 2022, according to state rail infrastructure administrator Adif.

The accident is the deadliest train crash in Spain since 2013, when 80 people died in a derailment in Santiago de Compostela. It is also among the 20 deadliest rail accidents in Europe over the past 80 years, according to Eurostat.

Puente said the Iryo train was less than four years old, and the track had been fully renovated last May at a cost of 700 million euros ($813.5 million). Iryo added that the train was last inspected on January 15.

Spain’s high-speed rail network, the largest in Europe and second only to China globally, spans 3,622 km. Around 10 million passengers used the Madrid–Andalusia high-speed connection in 2024, according to the Spanish competition authority.

The network has faced criticism for delays caused by power outages and theft of copper cables across sparsely populated areas. Spain opened its high-speed rail network to private operators in 2020, with Iryo—a joint venture of Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato, airline Air Nostrum, and Spanish investment fund Globalvia—starting operations in November 2022. The train involved, a Frecciarossa 1000, is Trenitalia’s flagship high-speed train, capable of speeds up to 400 kph.