High-Speed Train Crash in Spain's Toledo Province Leaves at Least 68 Dead, 58 Hospitalized

On a flat stretch of track between the towns of Urda and Los Yébenes, in Spain's Toledo province, a high-speed train struck the back of another train that had come to a halt. The collision on Wednesday morning knocked two cars off the rails and killed at least 68 people, according to local authorities. The regional government of Castilla-La Mancha confirmed that toll and said another 58 people were receiving treatment in hospitals. Rescue workers were still searching the wreckage for survivors and bodies.

Both trains were heading from Madrid toward Seville, in the same direction. Padilla, speaking to state broadcaster TVE, said one ran into the tail of the other while it was stopped. One belonged to the state-owned company RENFE and the other to the private operator IRYO, the same two companies whose trains were involved in a crash in January. Padilla said 397 passengers were aboard the RENFE train and 147 on the IRYO train. Rail operator ADIF said service was suspended between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia.

The scene was one of destruction. The crash happened among olive fields, and the carriages were shredded into fragments of metal and other material, with debris scattered down a gravel slope. Health Minister Mónica García said emergency teams were concentrating on getting survivors and bodies out of the most badly damaged cars. "It was a high-speed impact, so we are expecting this to be a tragedy," she said.

Passengers described the moment of impact. Ignacio Relaño, who was on the RENFE train, told TVE the train had stopped briefly on the line, started again, and then hit the IRYO train. He said everyone felt it slow abruptly, then the impact; the car leaned as if it would tip over, and luggage and phones flew through the air. He said he hit his nose. Another passenger said, "We were all thrown into the air," and described himself as reasonably okay but his friend as in much worse shape. A woman told Cadena Ser she was thrown forward in her seat, breaking the small table in front of her, and said she saw body parts and trapped people covered in blood.

Transport Minister Óscar Puente laid out a sequence of events he blamed on the central command center for Spain's trains. At 8:30 a.m., he said, the security system on a 63-kilometer (39-mile) stretch failed because of a computer malfunction, which stopped all trains there. The command center then told the RENFE train to start moving again without speed restrictions, and it hit the stopped IRYO train at 8:53 a.m. Puente called that order "inexplicable." A stop signal was still active on the line, he said, so the train should not have been released at all, and if it was, it should have been told to go slowly. He said the engineers were not to blame.

Authorities were still working out how fast the train was moving, but Puente said it could have been traveling at 200 kph (124 mph), the permitted speed for that section. "I am not attributing responsibility to anyone, I am just stating the facts," he said.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went to the crash site and announced three days of national mourning. "Today all of Spain is grieving," he said. He called for stronger safety measures to restore confidence in a high-speed network that was once a point of national pride, and said it was unacceptable for Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in one year. In Urda, Mayor Manuel Galán told TVE that civil protection authorities had asked the town hall to prepare a sports pavilion to receive passengers.

The January crash, in southern Spain, killed 45 people when a train derailed and hit an oncoming train. Until now, it was the deadliest in Spain since a 2013 crash that killed 80, and it had already shaken the country's trust in its rail network. With a national election set for Nov. 29, Sánchez faces it with this second disaster fresh, and the investigation into the command center's order and the train's speed is likely to be central to what follows.