In 2021, Isabel Pardo de Vera, then the president of Adif, Spain’s state-owned railway infrastructure manager, awarded a contract to upgrade an aging rail line safety system between Madrid and Seville by January 2026.
“Line renewal had been planned for a long time,” she said in an interview on Thursday. But after she had moved on from the position and eventually left the government, she was surprised, she said, to discover this year that the enhanced system still “wasn’t implemented.”
Much of Spain focused on technical questions about the same railway signal system after one high-speed train rear-ended another stopped on the same tracks of the Madrid-Seville line on Wednesday, killing at least 69 people, officials said. More than 50 people were still in hospitals on Thursday, about 15 in critical condition. Adif declined to comment about its rail safety system.
In a time of concern that humans could be losing control over technology, the crash prompted questions instead about a lack of technological safeguards against human error. Spain’s vast rail system, once a point of pride — and an attraction to a growing number of tourists, foreigners and boosters of Spanish growth — has become a source of anxiety. The crash, coming after a disastrous collision in January on the same line, intensified attention on Spain’s aging infrastructure, lack of maintenance and overall safety issues.
On Thursday, reports emerged of previous safety concerns.
One report, using data from Adif, listed all the signal problems that riddled a stretch of railway in central Spain now known as the site of Wednesday’s deadly crash. Another highlighted a warning by Spain’s railway accident investigation commission that the country put too much reliance on the “human factor” of train controllers. Still another focused on a top train executive telling a Spanish Senate committee that the signaling system on the Madrid-Seville line was “fairly old” and that whenever it went down, it forced delays.
As Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, facing elections next month, promised to get to the bottom of the crash, his left-wing government pointed to human error. A train traffic control operator, officials said, told the rear train to resume its normal high speed even though another train was stopped on the same tracks after the automatic safety system had gone down.
On Thursday, Mr. Sánchez met for hours with Adif officials at their headquarters in Madrid’s Atocha train station. Neither he or the association’s train traffic controllers would comment on their discussion. Earlier in the day, he went to the town of Urda, near the crash site, to show his support for grieving families and a shaken country.
“I want to reassure all citizens that the entire central government and all the institutions of the state are working day and night, not only to respond to the needs of the victims’ families,” he said, “but also to establish every last detail of what caused this tragedy and to strengthen safety measures so that something like this never happens again.”
But some critics argued that Mr. Sánchez should examine his own government.
Ms. Pardo de Vera, who left the government in 2023 and is under investigation over accusations of corruption in handling unrelated public contracts, which she denies, said the government’s emphasis on human error did not erase its recent shortcomings when it came to “maintenance, or construction, or operations, or traffic management.” She added, “what they have done to safety, that is the root problem.”
Adif did not return a request for comment about the criticism.
On Wednesday, the government’s transportation minister, Óscar Puente, told reporters that the crash had resulted from an “inexplicable” decision by train traffic control operators in Madrid.
About 8:30 a.m., half an hour after the latter train — run by the national operator, Renfe — departed, the aging safety system along that section of the railway went down because of a computer failure.
Following protocol, Mr. Puente said, a train traffic control center in Madrid took over. An operator, who has not been identified, told the Renfe train to resume its journey.
According to the Spanish newspaper El País, which obtained audio of the exchanges between the conductors and the operators in Madrid, an operator authorized the driver of the Iryo train to resume “normal speed.” But seven minutes later, the Iryo driver called to report that she could not restart the train.
Mr. Puente said the Madrid operators had told the Renfe train conductor to resume regular travel “despite there being another train ahead of it.”
The Renfe train traveled 15 miles, or about 25 kilometers, before rear-ending the other train, which had remained stopped on the tracks.
Questions on Thursday centered on why the stopped Iryo train didn’t start again, as Madrid’s train traffic operators had authorized it at 8:41 a.m. to resume its journey.
The Iryo conductor twice sought unsuccessfully to restart the train, El País reported on Thursday. Unlike the older Renfe train barreling toward it, the Iryo train was relatively new, and so took longer to sync with the old safety system protecting train traffic, causing a delay of nearly four minutes each time to restart.
The Iryo conductor made it clear to the traffic controllers that she was stopped, according to the recording, but an operator instead could be heard saying she was traveling forward at a slow speed.
The Renfe train slammed into it at 8:53 a.m.
On Thursday, details about the victims also began to emerge. Among the dead were Japanese and South Korean nationals who had been traveling on a line popular with tourists coming from Madrid, the capital, to the historic city of Seville. The conductor of the rear train, Antonio Acedo, also died in the crash, according to the political party to which he belonged.
While the government urged a time of grieving, the political opponents of Mr. Sánchez didn’t waste a minute to react, with national elections set for Nov. 29.
“We will not accept a period of mourning that silences us while Spaniards are dying,” Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right party Vox, said at a rally on Wednesday evening in Valladolid, outside Madrid. Valladolid is the hometown of Mr. Puente. Mr. Abascal has taken to calling him the “minister of death.”
Mr. Puente fell into the political cross hairs within hours of the crash, when the first question put to him in a news conference was whether he would quit. (He said he wasn’t thinking about himself at the moment.)
But criticism from the left and the right has only ratcheted up since then, as Mr. Puente, known as the government’s social-media-addicted attack dog, has overseen two historic rail disasters linked to infrastructure. It didn’t help that he recently danced on a talk show set featuring straphangers on a bumpy ride. During that appearance, he made a humorous reference to delays caused by system failures on Renfe.
There was a deeply different mood in Atocha station on Thursday, where workers for Renfe, in purple-trimmed jackets, observed minutes of silence next to Iryo workers in red blazers. Many of the Iryo workers wept and hugged one another. One woman, María, said she was there to mourn two of her friends who did “onboard sales,” pushing a cart selling sodas and snacks up the aisles.
Saúl Sánchez, a volunteer psychologist with Madrid’s Civil Protection office, had spent the morning counseling the family of victims.
“They are angry, frustrated, irate, a lot of things,” he said, adding, “They want information.”
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.