Spanish rail operator ADIF was warned about “severe wear and tear” on high-speed rail tracks last year, before a horrific collision killed at least 39 people on Sunday.
The SEMAF train drivers’ union wrote to the state-owned infrastructure manager in August to caution the operator about potholes, bumps and imbalances in overhead power lines that it said were causing frequent breakdowns and damaging trains.
The letter warned about damage on one of the tracks where two trains collided yesterday evening near Cordoba. It added that drivers had told the operator of their concerns “daily” but that no action had been taken.
Drivers had urged the operator to implement a maximum speed of 250kph (155mph) on damaged lines until the state of the network rail was improved.
A source briefed on the initial investigations into the disaster said today that experts had found a broken joint on the rails. Technicians on site identified wear on the joint between sections of the rail, known as a fishplate, which they said showed the fault had been there for some time, the source said.
They found that the faulty joint created a gap between the rail sections that widened as trains continued to travel on the track. The source, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the technicians believe the faulty joint is key to identifying the precise cause of the accident.
The fatal collision, near Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, killed dozens of people and left more than 120 injured, with 48 still in hospital and 12 in intensive care. It could be a month before an investigation determines the cause, transport minister Óscar Puente said.
Jose Trigueros, president of the Association of Road Engineers, said his preliminary analysis of images and information released by the authorities suggested “failure of the undercarriage of the back units” of the high-speed Freccia 1000 train, operated by Iryo, which was travelling north from Malaga to Madrid when it derailed.
Most of the casualties are believed to have been on board a second train, operated by Alvia, which is run by Spain’s public railway company Renfe. That train was heading south from Madrid to Huelva when it collided with the derailed Iryo train and was pushed off the tracks into an embankment.
ADIF had reported problems with infrastructure at Adamuz on social media – ranging from signalling failures to issues with overhead power lines – that caused delays to high-speed trains between Madrid and Andalusia 10 times since 2022.
The Spanish government was criticised last year for a series of delays on the network, caused by power outages and the theft of copper cables from the lines. The network is vulnerable to cable thefts, as it crosses large swathes of empty countryside.
Mr Puente said that the Iryo train was less than four years old and that the railway track had been completely renovated last May – before the warning from the SEMAF union – with an investment of €700m (£607m). Iryo said the train was last inspected on 15 January.
The transport minister called the accident “tremendously strange” and said that had it not been for the oncoming train, the derailment would have likely caused no deaths.
Renfe chief Alvaro Fernández Heredia ruled out human error and said that there was a 20-second interval between the first derailment and its impact with the train heading the other way, a period of time too short to activate the automatic braking system.
“It must have been some kind of failure in the rolling stock or the infrastructure, and that will take time [to investigate],” he said.
Officials said the Alvia train had apparently hit the derailed carriages or undercarriage debris of the Iryo. The 27-year-old driver of the Alvia train died in the crash, the Renfe chief said.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez on Monday promised a “thorough and absolutely transparent” investigation into the crash.
The country’s high-speed railway network, with 3,622km of tracks, is the largest in Europe and the second-biggest in the world after China, according to ADIF. Spain opened up its high-speed rail network to private competition in 2020 in a bid to offer low-cost alternatives to Renfe’s AVE trains.
Iryo is a joint venture between Italian state railway operator Ferrovie dello Stato, airline Air Nostrum and Spanish infrastructure investment fund Globalvia. It began operating in November 2022, starting with the Madrid-Barcelona route and expanding to other major cities.
The Iryo ETR1000 train is manufactured by the partnership of Hitachi Rail-Bombardier in Europe for Ferrovie’s unit Trenitalia. Renfe’s Alvia trains are manufactured by local makers CAF and Talgo.
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