Emergency services have put the death toll at close to 46 after two high-speed trains collided near the station of Urda, in the central Spanish province of Toledo, on the morning of October 28.
That estimate came from regional civil protection sources quoted by Cadena SER and had not been officially confirmed. Esther Padilla, spokeswoman for the Castilla-La Mancha regional government, put the confirmed count at 10 in remarks to regional television and said the figure was likely to keep rising as firefighters and emergency crews worked through the wreckage.
The collision happened at 8.54am at kilometre point 118 of the Madrid-Seville high-speed line, between the towns of Mora, Orgaz and Urda, according to Adif, the State-owned infrastructure manager. A Renfe AVE service ran into the back of a train operated by Iryo, the private company majority-owned by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato.
Two carriages came off the track and fell down an embankment, the regional 112 emergency service said. Firefighters from Alcázar de San Juan and Orgaz, Guardia Civil units, Red Cross teams, three medical helicopters and two intensive-care ambulances were sent to the site.
Adif suspended traffic between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia, and Renfe offered free changes and cancellations to passengers on the affected services. The regional government activated its territorial emergency plan at its first operational level.
The crash struck the same corridor as the Adamuz disaster of January 18, in which 45 people died and more than 150 were injured when an Iryo train derailed in the province of Córdoba and was hit by a Renfe Alvia service.
That accident was the worst on the Spanish network since the Santiago de Compostela derailment of 2013, which killed 80. Spain’s rail accident investigation body, the CIAF, found afterwards that a fracture in the rail had been present before the train left the track.
The Adamuz crash is being investigated by Spain’s National Court and prompted a three-day national strike by train drivers in February, as well as a compensation scheme worth €20 million. Transport Minister Óscar Puente, who has faced repeated questions about maintenance of the line, left a public event in Madrid shortly after news of the Urda collision broke.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suspended his engagements for the day. The conservative Partido Popular (PP) and other parties called off pre-campaign events ahead of the general election due on November 29.
Spain operates the largest high-speed network in the European Union, with more than 3,100km of dedicated track. The European Union Agency for Railways said after the January crash that it was monitoring the situation with the European Commission and stood ready to help the Spanish authorities.
