Puente stays in post as Urda high-speed train crash toll reaches 69

What happened at Urda

On Wednesday, 28 October, a Renfe train and an Iryo train collided near Urda in Toledo province, on the Madrid to Seville high-speed line. As of 1 November, 69 people had died, and the two trains carried 558 people between them. It is the second deadly high-speed accident on this line in under a year, after the crash at Adamuz in January that killed 46 people. Pedro Sánchez and Óscar Puente both acknowledged that two accidents of this severity in one year are unacceptable. The death toll was still moving on 1 November, so the final count may be higher.

Adamuz, January46

Urda, 28 October (as of 1 November)69

Adamuz, January

46 deaths

Urda, 28 October (as of 1 November)

69 deaths

Data from the article text

Puente stays in post

Puente has not resigned, and Moncloa wants him to remain with Sánchez's explicit backing. Sánchez's coalition partners and the unions expect him to step down, and in progressive circles a common view holds that he will serve a few days on urgent matters before leaving. Puente faced the press for nearly two hours and answered 52 questions, seven of them about why he had not stepped down. His explanation rested on a line he read from a prepared text.

“It was not my duty to be in that control centre that day, but now it is my duty to be in command.”

Sánchez said on Friday, 30 October, that confidence in the high-speed system has broken down.

“There is broken confidence in the high-speed system.”

The control room and the operator

Puente first blamed a human error by an operator at Adif's Atocha traffic control centre, who ordered traffic to resume after the LZB signalling system failed and trains were left stopped. The minister described the operator as a 48-year-old man with about two years of experience, who had been working for two hours when the crash occurred. A separate column describes the controller as in his twenties, a conflicting age that the articles do not reconcile. Unions, train drivers and experts have asked that the controller's screens be examined before anyone is blamed, and that workload, pressure and training be reviewed. Audio of a conversation between a train driver and the Atocha control room was leaked to the press on the night of the crash, and one column argues the extract was trimmed to suggest the controller was entirely to blame.

The LZB system and the investigation

Ramiro Aurín, an infrastructure engineer, argues that the primary failure is systemic and that human error is secondary. The LZB system dates from 1992, and Puente acknowledged that it failed 170 times this year on the same stretch, a figure he called normal. Thirteen months earlier, Puente told the Congress transport commission that LZB needed urgent modernization and was in the final phase of replacement, yet it had not been replaced when it failed on the day of the crash. Renfe has begun adopting the first changes, and Puente has announced new measures.

Political stakes and next steps

Columnists frame the crash as a campaign issue, with a general election about a month away. One column argues that a parliamentary investigation commission could now be useful for the first time. The judicial investigation will determine what happened in the control room, and the recorded conversations will be read in that context. The toll was still being updated when the coverage was published.