Bloodied and Dazed: Passengers Recount the Rail Crash That Turned a Routine Spanish Journey Into Disaster

It was nearly 08:30 on an ordinary Wednesday, and two high-speed trains were heading south from Madrid toward Seville. Some passengers were asleep. Some had opened laptops to start work. Others were scrolling on their phones. Then an announcement told them there was congestion on the tracks, and the trains stopped.

One train belonged to the private operator Iryo and carried 147 passengers. Behind it on the same line was a train run by the state-owned operator Renfe, with 397 people aboard. A reported computer failure in the automatic signalling system had forced all trains on the affected stretch to halt. Spain's transport minister, Óscar Puente, said that at 08:36 the Renfe train was ordered to proceed in error. Some 17 minutes later, what he called a truly unbelievable thing happened: the Renfe train struck the back of the Iryo train between the municipalities of Mora and Orgaz in Toledo province, about 140km (87 miles) south of Madrid.

Tangui Binier, 22, was in carriage eight, at the front of the Iryo train. His father was in carriage seven. Their train was one of six ordered to stop at 08:30. A few minutes later, he told the BBC, the train started speeding, then came to a sudden halt. Looking out of the window, he saw wires coming down on the left and a lot of smoke behind them.

On the Renfe train, journalist Roberto Gómez had been dozing. His train had stopped briefly, he said, then started moving again, and then came the crash. He had no idea his train had been cleared to proceed. "The impact was terrible," he told Onda Cero radio, describing a carriage completely destroyed with suitcases strewn everywhere. He suffered only minor injuries, though another passenger fell on top of him with a deep gash to the head. He and others helped people who had taken severe blows to the chest and ribs.

Rafael Barcelo was in one of the worst-hit carriages, having a coffee when he felt a huge impact. "We were all thrown into the air," he told Reuters at the site. A bruise on his forehead marks him as one of the lucky ones; his friend is in worse shape. He was in coach seven, the most destroyed and the one with the most victims, and said he counted at least eight there. Salvador Arriza, even in carriages far from the point of impact, described seats torn loose and passengers facing the direction of travel flung through the air, some trapped between seats. He saw a piece of track that had gone through the roof of one coach and thought it may have helped slow the train. Sebastián Herrero, thrown onto the seats in front of him, saw many people with broken noses and broken arms as smoke spread.

In Binier's carriage, passengers debated whether it was safe to leave with electrical wires lying outside. Some, fearing another train might hit them, chose to get out. Outside they saw the Renfe train behind theirs and their own train flipped over, its rear covered in debris. Binier described dead bodies and missing limbs, and said he did not know if he would ever recover. Those uninjured, he said, went to help; his father carried a girl with a broken hip to safety. Local people arrived first, then police and Guardia Civil ambulance crews. The article gives no official death toll.

Spain was already reeling from the Adamuz high-speed disaster outside Córdoba in January, which killed 46 people. That crash was on the same line, though much farther south, and Wednesday's accident has raised new questions for the authorities. Passengers were visibly angry. One said it made no sense that their train was held for five or ten minutes while the other was not told to stop, and asked how this could happen with today's technology. What investigators must now establish is why the driver behind was never warned.