115 dead in two Spanish high-speed crashes: the safety system questions

At least 115 people have died in two high-speed train accidents in Spain in under a year, and the country's transport minister Óscar Puentes has resigned over the double tragedy.

The most recent disaster, a high-speed collision near Urda in Toledo province on 28 October 2026, killed 69 people and injured around 200. It came before the country had recovered from the January derailment near Córdoba, which killed 46. The accumulation of two accidents at this scale, in the same year, on the same network, has turned a technical debate into a political one: Puente's resignation, a rare event in Spanish politics, landed days before snap elections that polls suggest the opposition is set to win, posing a direct threat to the PSOE-led government.

What failed at Urda?

The crash occurred on the Madrid–Seville line, the corridor where Spain's high-speed era began. The line is undergoing a major modernisation plan, yet it still relies predominantly on LZB, a German cab-signalling system (a continuous in-cab transmission that tells drivers their speed limits and movement authority) dating back to 1992.

The mechanism of the failure is straightforward to describe. When LZB is disrupted, trains fall back on conventional protections: trackside signals and automatic braking systems that should stop a train passing a red signal. At Urda, every layer failed at once. The fallback signals did not prevent the collision, and the automatic braking did not intervene in time. Safety architecture rests on redundancy; here the redundancy collapsed.

The EUobserver account of the crash closes on this point: railway safety cannot depend on a single technology, and when systems designed not to fail do fail, human control must step in. At Urda, it did not, or could not.

Was the replacement late?

Yes, by the calendar. The LZB is being replaced by ERTMS (the European Rail Traffic Management System, an EU standard intended to make signalling uniform across European networks and improve safety). The replacement contract, worth €93.8m and EU-funded, was awarded in 2021 with a completion deadline of January 2026.

That deadline passed. The work is still unfinished — on the very line where 69 people died in October.

Is underinvestment to blame?

Critics say yes, and they have numbers. High-speed services in Spain have increased by 52 percent since 2019, while maintenance spending, they argue, has failed to keep pace. The budget compounds the problem: Spain has been operating under its 2023 budget, rolled over for three consecutive years, a freeze that may have squeezed transport spending in particular.

The Spanish government rejects these claims. It has not, so far, offered a counter-narrative that addresses the specific signalling failure at Urda.

The context makes the scrutiny sharper. Spain runs the largest high-speed network in Europe and the second-largest in the world, after China — a scale that many Spaniards, the EUobserver author among them, did not fully register before these crashes. "It's inexplicable. I don't know whether I feel angrier or sadder about it," the author's mother told her, minutes before the transport minister announced his resignation.

What changes now?

Once is an accident, twice is a pattern, as the saying goes — and even if two crashes do not yet constitute a pattern, they force questions that one crash could be dismissed as answering. Those questions concern protocol, maintenance and accountability, and each now carries a political deadline attached to the snap elections.

The immediate pressure points are concrete: the completion of the €93.8m ERTMS rollout on the Madrid–Seville line, a review of how fallback signalling performed when LZB dropped out, and whether the budget rollover starved the maintenance accounts that critics say were already falling behind a 52 percent service expansion. The coming elections will decide who answers them.