Spain’s second high-speed rail disaster this year, a crash in which one train struck another from behind, killing 68 people, has raised fresh concerns about the safety of the country’s rail network.
Search teams with sniffer dogs continued to look for victims on Thursday morning, a day after the collision in central Spain.
Cranes were in place to help shift the carriages as police and soldiers helped pick through the wreckage strewn down the gravel slope where at least three train carriages were tossed by the impact.
The spokesperson for the Castilla La Mancha region, Esther Padilla, said that 53 people remained in hospital with 15 in critical care at different hospitals on Thursday. Ms Padilla said the death toll remained at 68, but was still provisional.
“Emergency workers and the military emergency brigade are still working with much care because we still can’t be sure that there aren’t more victims,” she told national broadcaster TVE.
Spain’s network of high-speed rail has been considered one of the nation’s crowning achievements. It ranks second to China in track mileage in the world, and until this year, it had not endured a deadly crash since coming into service more than three decades ago.
But the collision, which turned a sleepy stretch of railway lined by olive groves into a scene of carnage, came just four weeks before the country votes in a national election.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited the crash site in the central province of Toledo after regional authorities confirmed that more than 60 people had died and dozens more were being treated at hospitals.
Only in January, 46 people had died when one train jumped the track and slammed into the side of another going the opposite way in southern Spain.
Mr Sanchez pledged an investigation into the latest collision and improvements to prevent another tragedy like the two that have shaken trust in a rail system that carried 45 million travellers last year, including millions of tourists.
He said: “It is clear that we need to reinforce the safety of our train service to rebuild the trust in our high-speed rail. It is not acceptable for a country like Spain to endure two high-speed train accidents in the same year.”
Mr Sanchez’s government declared three days of mourning starting on Thursday.
Both deadly crashes this year involved a train operated by the state-owned Renfe company and one from the privately owned Iryo. Spain only liberalised its high-speed rail service in 2021, with the Italian Iryo starting service the following year.
Transport minister, Oscar Puente, said that the crash was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command centre for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed.
He said the train engineers were not to blame.
Mr Puente said that at 8.30am, the security system on a stretch of 63km stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop.
At that point the Iryo train was stopped near the town of Urda, while the Renfe train was 25km behind.
But a few minutes later the central command told the Renfe train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it ended up colliding with the stationary Iryo train at 8.53am.
Mr Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since there was still a “stop signal” active on that line, and that if it had, at least it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Workers started to use cranes to move parts of the damaged trains late on Wednesday after a hectic day involving hundreds of emergency workers, firefighters, police and soldiers all pitching in to rescue survivors and recover bodies.
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