A rant about the Urda rail disaster
In the Newsletter this week
Analysis: A rant about the Urda rail disaster
Good week: Siemens wins the contract for 30(+10) high speed trains for Spain
Also a good week: Renfe starts to clear up its train categories
Bad week: GoVolta catches fire
Elsewhere this week: First #CrossBorderRail explainer video on YouTube
Photo of the week: TGV-M power cars in OUIGO livery at Belfort
Newsletter 037, Friday 30th October 2026.
Subscriber-only newsletter, sent every Friday at 14:00 CET/CEST, today a bit delayed.
A rant about the Urda rail disaster
(This week's newsletter was meant to be about the December timetable change, but that's going to have to wait for next week)
I am in a few messenger groups full of rail nerds, and it was in one of these groups where a friend posted a first picture of the Urda rail disaster on Wednesday morning, before anything was in the media. Everyone's first reaction was shock. Again! How?
And then very quickly, anger took over. Anger of a ferocity I have not seen among these people before.
Within an hour, and with the media now in overdrive, 'government sources' were briefing it was human error. "Fuck them" one of my friends in the group responded. "Whole point of railways is that they all but eliminate human error," someone else responded. Perhaps not quite the right phrasing due to the heat of the moment, but the gist is correct: we have two centuries of railways steadily eliminating human error as the cause of catastrophes.
This is not just a human error. It is a systemic failure.
And so the story went on, with everyone briefing and counter briefing about what happened. Spain's transport minister Puente (never someone to think much before he opens his mouth, tempestuousness no doubt heightened due to election season) joined in, saying it was "inexplicable" that the control centre had requested the AVE train proceed. And then the conversations between control centre and the two trains that crashed were leaked, and blame attributed. "Fastest railway investigation since the invention of steam locomotives" someone in the messenger group quipped.
But all the leaks and allegations raised more questions than they answered. If, as had been reported, the LZB signalling system was not active on the track section where the collision happened, what was the "marcha normal" (normal speed) that the AVE train was supposed to go? As the Iryo train had communicated back to the control centre that it could not move, would there have been an opportunity to radio the AVE train to warn them of the danger? We do not know. But all we do know is that would be one hell of a responsibility to put on the shoulders of a staff member in the control centre, and humans make errors.
And as if that were not enough, we also do not know if the procedures are even the right ones, and if the procedures - as written - were correctly followed in this case, or correctly followed more widely. That the AVE train could have been moving as fast as 200km/h without any automatic train protection system active (which seems to be possible based on one interpretation of the rules) drew astonished reactions from some railway insiders from other European countries I was in touch with. We also know there were problems with the signalling on the line - because the CEO of Iryo had said so, to the Spanish Parliament no less, just three weeks earlier.
This is also all set against the backdrop of the Adamuz disaster in January that was caused by a broken rail. We still do not know exactly why the rail broke, or who was responsible for it breaking, but we do know that Adif - the network operator - had not followed its own internal procedures to check the track section where the derailment took place.
A systemic failure in other words.
Putting all of this right would not be impossible.
We know how to design procedures and build railways that can be run safely. But making sure that is done is a political choice in the end. A choice of how much to invest, and in what. A choice of whether technical merit or political expediency determines who is employed, where. A choice to face up to failures and to improve, or a decision to blame shift instead.
At least 69 people perished this week, and 46 died at Adamuz. Deaths that should not have happened. That death toll should be reason enough for systemic change. But sat here writing this, 48 hours after the Urda crash, I do not really believe we will see that. And so my anger still burns.