At 8:36 a.m. on Wednesday, a controller at Adif’s command center in Madrid’s Atocha station told the driver of a halted AVE high-speed train to “resume running under BSL at normal speed.” Seventeen minutes later that train ran into a stationary Iryo train near Urda, in Toledo province, and at least 68 people were killed.
Spain’s rules for that moment are written down, and they point the other way. Under the national Railway Traffic Regulations of 2015 and an Adif instruction in force since February 2025, a high-speed train whose cab shows a target speed of zero after its LZB protection system drops out is standing behind occupied track. It may move again only on a controller’s explicit authorization, and then only “on sight,” slow enough to stop short of anything ahead. Drivers and the Spanish press put that at no more than 40 kilometers an hour, about 25 miles an hour. Recordings of the radio calls, published Wednesday by Cadena SER, El País and elDiario.es, show the AVE’s driver reporting exactly that zero reading. The driver was then cleared at normal speed.
Transport Minister Óscar Puente has said who was responsible: the control center. The record is less tidy. The authorization was the last link in a chain that also included a computer fault that removed protection across 63 kilometers, a backup braking system that never engaged by one newspaper’s account, a European signaling upgrade ordered in 2021 and still not switched on, and a driver who queried the order and then obeyed it. Spain has been here before. After the Angrois derailment in 2013, which killed 80 people, the official inquiry and in the end the courts put the blame on the man at the controls, and European regulators said the investigation was not independent. Urda will be judged against that record and against January’s crash at Adamuz, on the same Madrid-Seville line.
Seventeen minutes on the radio
The fault began at about 8:30, when computers serving the Urda station lost communication with one another, Mr. Puente said at a news conference at Atocha on Wednesday afternoon. That took down LZB, a German-designed system that supervises train speed through a cable laid along the track, over a 63-kilometer stretch, and every train on it braked to a halt. He put the number at six, though he said he was not certain, Al Jazeera reported. Adif’s first public word came on its service account on X, minutes after the impact.
⚠️Se encuentra interrumpida la circulación en la línea de alta velocidad Madrid-Andalucía por un alcance entre dos trenes.
The recordings, as transcribed by Todo Alicante, begin at 8:31, when the driver of AVE 2080, bound for Seville, called Atocha. “I’ve had a partial-block fault, 000,” the driver said, according to Público, which noted that this is the more restrictive of the two LZB transmission faults in the drivers’ rule book. Control-room staff could be heard hesitating, saying they were “getting confused because they say they are going to fix it.” At 8:36 the controller gave the order. “At normal speed?” the driver asked. “Yes.”
At 8:41 the driver of Iryo 6076 reported a loss of transmission with a target speed of 40 and said she was stopped at the Urda home signal. The controller told her she was not authorized to pass it, then gave her nearly the same instruction the AVE had received. At 8:48 she called back to say the train would not let her reset LZB and she was still stopped at the signal. “No problem. When you can, and if you have problems, call us,” the controller replied, El Español reported. No countermand went to the AVE, and nobody told its driver a train was standing ahead. The impact came at about 8:53, at kilometer point 118.
The AVE’s speed is not settled. Mr. Puente said it could have been doing 200 kilometers an hour. El Español, working from Renfe’s public train-position data as archived by the site SpainTrainRadar, calculated an average of 137 km/h over the minute of the collision and 181.27 km/h over the minute before. A one-minute average is not an impact speed, and the trains’ juridical recorders will settle it. The AVE carried 397 passengers and the Iryo 147, according to Esther Padilla, a spokeswoman for the regional government. Of the dead, 24 were on the AVE and 44 on the Iryo, the government of Castilla-La Mancha said, as CNN reported. Its president, Emiliano García-Page, said four bodies were still trapped in the wreckage.
What the rule book says
Mr. Puente pointed to two documents, which Todo Alicante published and translated. The first is the Railway Traffic Regulations, approved by Royal Decree 664/2015 in July 2015. The second is Instruction COI 01/25, issued in January 2025 by Adif’s high-speed traffic directorate and in force since Feb. 1, 2025.
The 2015 text is specific about a zero reading. It means the section up to the next home signal is occupied, and the driver must brake, stop, report the exact stopping point and wait for orders. The traffic controller, “having received the relevant data and performed the required checks,” then sets up lineside signal block, or BSL, and authorizes the train to continue “On Sight” to the next signal. On-sight running means matching speed to what the driver can see. The regulation adds that a verbal authorization of this kind never allows a train to pass a red signal.
The 2025 instruction goes further. It requires “that the BSL block section to be traversed is clear of trains” before running resumes, and it says it answers three recommendations from the accident commission and the Directorate-General for Railways, made after “incidents during degraded infrastructure operations.” Read together, the two documents split the duty plainly. The controller decides whether a train may move, and on what terms, after checking the line. The driver stops, reports and, if released, proceeds on sight. On Hacker News, one reader asked about the machinery that is supposed to back both of them up.
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
On this line, going by what is public, the fallback came down to discipline. BSL running relies on lineside signals backed by ASFA, an older beacon system that brakes a train automatically if the driver ignores a warning or exceeds a controlled speed. El Español reported that ASFA “did not activate at any point.” José María Goicolea, of Spain’s Association of Civil Engineers, told Europa Press that the system may have been in manual mode. Investigators have confirmed neither account.
The newer protection is ERTMS, the European train-control standard already in service on other AVE lines. Adif awarded Thales the contract to install it between Madrid and Seville on Sept. 14, 2021, for 93.83 million euros including tax, with a 52-month term, El Español reported Thursday. The target was January or February 2026, then April 2026. Adif now plans service in 2027, with tests underway. Mr. Puente acknowledged on Wednesday that no system was in place to stop a human error, El Español reported, even as he said, “It’s not the system.”
Who made the call
Mr. Puente spent Wednesday morning in the round-the-clock control center, he wrote on X, gathering what information he could.
En el centro de control H24 desde 9:40 tratando de obtener toda la información posible de lo ocurrido.
What he described from inside it put the decision there. “The decision to resume traffic without the system having been restored corresponds to the control centre,” he said, calling the circumstances “inexplicable” and saying the drivers were not to blame. He said other drivers received the same “normal” instruction that morning and caught it. One told the operator, “It can’t be normal running, it has to be on-sight running,” and the operator answered, “Ah, yes, on-sight running,” Mr. Puente said, according to El Español. He described the operator as experienced and said a supervisor was on duty. “There was time to correct the wrong decision,” he said, “but the impact with the Iryo train happens.” He also said, as CBC reported:
I am not attributing responsibility to anyone, I am just stating the facts
Accounts differ on how many trains got the wrong order. El Español said at least two drivers were told they could resume at normal speed. Público reported that the controller gave it to the drivers of six trains whose calls the ministry reviewed, and that some corrected it. Renfe said its driver was running because the driver had been authorized to. The rule book told that driver what a 000 reading meant, and the recordings show one query before acceptance. Investigators have not said in public whether a driver may, or must, refuse a controller’s instruction that contradicts the regulations.
The Civil Guard, including its Central Operational Unit, questioned the operator on Wednesday along with his entire shift, Moncloa.com reported. Alcohol and drug tests on the controllers were negative, and the Civil Guard did not say whether they spoke as witnesses or suspects. The investigating court in Orgaz has sealed the case, ordered the black boxes seized, closed two kilometers of track and sent judicial police to Atocha for traffic data and for Adif’s report on who was in command, elDiario.es reported. Vox, the far-right party, filed a criminal complaint alleging negligent homicide and injury against Adif officials, above all the Atocha operators.
The union CSIF demanded Mr. Puente’s resignation in a statement. It accused him of using the worker “as a scapegoat” instead of taking responsibility, “especially when an investigation has only just begun,” and asked that the controller’s presumption of innocence be respected. CSIF said it had warned in September that Adif staff were working shifts of up to 12 hours a day and five nights in a row, which it said caused “extreme wear” in jobs such as directing traffic. The controller’s hours on Wednesday have not been made public. On Hacker News, a reader made a related point about practice.
Honestly, to blame the controller after the automated system has failed is pretty low. The system does not run this way normally for good reasons, and whilst the controller maybe trained to handle the situation they won’t be well practised at it.
The recordings have become part of the fight. Cadena SER, El País and elDiario.es published them at the same moment, and El Independiente wrote that the release supported the minister’s version while drawing attention away from the LZB failure and from responsibility higher up. OKDiario accused the government of leaking them to friendly outlets. Who released them could not be independently verified.
The Angrois precedent
On July 24, 2013, an Alvia train entered the curve at Angrois, outside Santiago de Compostela, at 176 kilometers an hour and derailed. Eighty people died. Spain’s accident commission, CIAF, concluded in June 2014 that the driver’s inattention, caused by a phone call he took seconds earlier, was the only cause, the International Railway Journal reported. On Hacker News, a reader saw the same shape in Wednesday’s crash.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn’t.
European regulators rejected the commission’s work. In July 2016 the European Union Agency for Railways told the European Commission that the accident had “not yet been independently investigated as required by the Railway Safety Directive,” Railway Gazette reported, pointing to staff from Adif, Renfe and the state engineering company Ineco on the investigating team. The agency recommended a new inquiry. Spain never opened one.
The courts went further, then pulled back. On July 26, 2024, a Santiago criminal court sentenced the driver, Francisco Garzón, and Adif’s former director of traffic safety, Andrés Cortabitarte, to two and a half years in prison on 79 counts of negligent homicide and 143 of negligent injury, La Región reported. The judge found that nothing on the track protected the train if, for any reason, the driver failed to comply, and that Mr. Cortabitarte had authorized switching off ERTMS on that stretch. In January this year the provincial court in A Coruña upheld Mr. Garzón’s sentence and acquitted Mr. Cortabitarte. A dissenting magistrate wrote that on that stretch the risk had been “consciously transferred in its entirety to the driver.”
Antonio Benítez Ostos, a lawyer who has represented Angrois victims, told the Catalan newspaper Ara five days after Adamuz that the commission still included a member who had worked 20 years at Renfe.
When a person has worked for organizations involved in the incident, the true independence required by Europe is not met.
Jesús Domínguez, spokesman for the Angrois victims’ platform, said on Wednesday that Urda was again the consequence of Angrois never being properly investigated, Galiciapress reported. “Blaming human error in a high-speed accident is, truly, crass ignorance,” he said. “Humans make mistakes once in every 500 or 1,000 times.” He called on Mr. Puente to apologize and resign.
Earlier warnings on the line
Protection has failed on the Madrid-Seville line before. On May 16, 2011, at Los Gavilanes, just outside Madrid, Renfe train 5180 left Atocha with its digital ASFA disconnected because of a fault, received no LZB transmission and ran past an entry signal showing stop, coming close to colliding with train 8182. The commission’s report named the failure of both systems as a contributing factor.
Controllers appear in the commission’s files too. In a report on an incident at Blanes, on the Catalan commuter network, it named an improper authorization to pass a signal at stop, given by a central traffic controller, as a cause, and cited the absence of supervision protocols in the chain of command to check such authorizations. The recommendations behind COI 01/25 date from 2019 and 2020.
Vozpópuli reported that the commission’s annual report records seven warnings from the State Railway Safety Agency to Adif over the past year, including requests to update protocols covering “stopping points in LZB” and to set out which actions belong to each person involved when signaling fails. The outlet said Adif had allegedly failed to meet those demands. It did not report a response from Adif.
Adamuz and the promises
On Jan. 18, an Iryo train derailed near Adamuz, in Córdoba province, and was struck by an oncoming Renfe train, killing 46 people by Reuters’ count and 45 by The Associated Press’s. Ignacio Barrón, the commission’s president, said on Jan. 26 that everything seemed to show the main cause was the breaking “not so much of the rail as of a weld.” Nine months on, the inquiry still points to the weld, but the black boxes have not been analyzed, El Español reported this week. Days after Adamuz, a commuter train derailed near Barcelona.
On Feb. 11, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told Congress that the Adamuz track had “rigorously complied with all control and maintenance protocols.” He announced an agreement with rail unions: 1.8 billion euros more for maintenance, 3,600 new staff at Adif and Renfe, replacement rates of at least 115 percent and 50 more professionals at the rail safety agency, according to the government. The journalist Graham Keeley told Al Jazeera that the government also promised after January to check every line in the country. At Urda on Wednesday, Mr. Sánchez said, “It is unacceptable for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in the same year,” and added that the causes appeared unrelated, CBS News reported.
Before 2026 nobody had died in a crash on Spain’s dedicated high-speed lines since the first opened in 1992, CBS and The Associated Press reported. Eurostat data for 2024 put Spain among five E.U. countries with one or fewer rail deaths per thousand kilometers of track, in a bloc where 750 people died in rail accidents that year, according to the agency. But accidents including derailments and collisions rose from 45 in 2016 to 57 in 2024 and 69 in 2025, according to Spain’s railway safety authority, as cited by Reuters. From 2018 to 2022 Spain spent about 1.5 billion euros a year on its high-speed network, with only some 16 percent of it set aside for maintenance, renewal and upgrades, according to European Commission data. On Hacker News, a reader argued that the risk to passengers was being overstated.
Doing anything is a risk. The salient thing is relative risk.
The Eurostat figures back that commenter on overall risk. But the year’s toll on the dedicated lines, 46 at Adamuz and 68 at Urda, is 114 deaths after 33 years with none, and passengers have noticed. About 25 million people rode Spanish high-speed trains in the first half of this year, down roughly 14 percent from a year earlier, according to a Reuters analysis of competition-authority data.
Weighing the arguments
Mr. Puente’s case rests on the strongest evidence anyone has published: written rules that forbid what was ordered, and a recording of the order. The exchange he described, in which another driver objected and the operator agreed at once, suggests the rule was known in the room. Against that, the same wrong instruction went to more than one train in a single morning, by both El Español’s and Público’s accounts. That describes a control room under strain, not one misspoken sentence. On Hacker News, a reader went further and guessed at a habit.
Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
Nothing published so far supports that guess. No report shows that LZB failures on the line were routine or that controllers regularly released trains at line speed, and the commenter called it reading between the lines. What the record does show is that the safeguards that would have caught a single bad instruction were missing or idle: ERTMS late, ASFA not engaged by El Español’s account, and no warning to the AVE in the 12 minutes after the Iryo driver first called. The union’s fatigue claim is plausible and unproven until the rotas are public. Mr. Puente said Spain’s rail system is “reliable and safe” but has “some limits,” The Independent reported. By El Español’s account he also conceded that nothing would have stopped this error, which leaves Mr. Domínguez’s argument standing. Janos Rozsa, a railway accident investigator, told CNN that accidents “rarely have a single cause” and that investigators would have to understand:
the circumstances in which people were working and how the overall system was designed to keep these trains apart.
What comes next
The accident commission has opened its inquiry, which is expected to take months, with a preliminary report sooner. It may be one of the commission’s last. Spain is replacing it with a single authority for rail, maritime and air accidents, led by Gonzalo Guillén, a former maritime officer and naval engineer, who promised lawmakers “an unprecedented level of independence,” Railway Gazette reported in June. In May a parliamentary committee rejected the rail nominee, Adolfo Moreno, who was Renfe’s safety chief at the time of Angrois. It was not clear which body will carry the Urda inquiry to its end.
The court in Orgaz is waiting on the recorders and the Atocha traffic data. Renfe suspended Madrid-Andalusia service on Thursday and said an alternative transport plan would run on Friday. Renfe’s drivers in the SEMAF union began a 24-hour strike the day after the crash, over safety commitments they say have not been kept, and the union kept six days of strikes it had called at Ouigo. National mourning runs through Saturday.
Asked at Atocha whether he would resign, Mr. Puente said, “Resign? At this moment I am not thinking about myself.” He heads the Socialist list in Valladolid for the general election on Nov. 29.