URDA, Spain — Investigators in Spain are focusing on a decision made inside a Madrid rail control room after a high-speed train plowed into the back of a stopped train Wednesday morning in the central province of Toledo, killing 68 people in the country’s second deadly high-speed crash this year.
Regional authorities said 58 people remained in hospitals. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the wreck site among the olive groves near Urda, promised an investigation and safety improvements, and declared three days of national mourning beginning Thursday.
Transport Minister Óscar Puente laid out the sequence. Around 8:30 a.m., a computer fault knocked out the automated LZB safety system along a 63-kilometer stretch of track, bringing about six trains to a stop and putting traffic under the control center’s direction. At 8:36, a state-run Renfe AVE train was cleared to return to normal running even though a red signal was still showing. It traveled roughly 25 kilometers before striking a stationary train operated by private rival Iryo at about 8:53.
Puente called the control center’s order inexplicable and said the drivers were not at fault. Under the backup procedure Spain uses when automation fails, trains must creep along slowly enough for drivers to stop short of any obstacle. Officials are still pulling data to pin down the AVE’s speed, which Puente said may have hit 200 kilometers per hour on that section.
The disaster shakes confidence in a network that ranks second only to China’s in high-speed track length and carried 45 million passengers last year, many of them tourists. Before 2026 it had gone more than three decades without a fatal crash. In January, 46 people died in southern Spain when a train left the rails and hit another coming the other way; that wreck also involved Renfe and Iryo trains.
The crash lands about four weeks before Spaniards vote in a national election. Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo of the Popular Party called for a full investigation and canceled his party’s campaign events for the day.
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