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Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision

53 points ultral 1 hour ago 50 comments

Scaled 1 hour ago | parent

Article is completely pay walled; please consider deleting and reposting with a readable source.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

Considering how much tech industry feeds, steals and takes advantage of others, this "no paid resources" meme stopped to sound reasonable a while ago.

Journalists who actually do work that feeds our AI should be paid and their paid resources should be linked.

1dom 59 minutes ago | parent

This is public news. There should be free resources available. They should be the resources published here.

Nobody's saying journalists shouldn't be paid. But that doesn't mean all public access to public news should be paywalled.

jazzyjackson 37 minutes ago | parent

What you’re asking for is state run media

vlyan 30 minutes ago | parent

this article is 99% likely an AI-assisted rewrite from a freely-available report, lmao.

99% of original content from "journalists" are worthless opinion pieces.

SecretDreams 23 minutes ago | parent

I agree, but we need a balance here where I can pay for a sub and it gives me an all access pass to a variety of news sources.

The whole world has sub fatigue. I can't sub to everything.

Segway: make the internet itself a paid subscription and then have a profit sharing model for all content generators. Ban ads. Shit, make it something covered through taxes that governments around the world support and have billionaires subsidize it more heavily.

gregoriol 1 hour ago | parent

The criteria shouldn't be paid or not, it should be quality or slop.

Angostura 39 minutes ago | parent

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv1j309d4g98t - available to me - I'm not sure how accessible the BBC news is now to those elsewhere?

Frieren 1 hour ago | parent

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20261028-two-high-speed-t...

As of writing the article says 10. Other sources, sadly, indicate up to 39.

qeternity 1 hour ago | parent

There is something deeply broken with Spanish rail.

aarroyoc 1 hour ago | parent

The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.

bombcar 55 minutes ago | parent

This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.

People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).

jiwidi 53 minutes ago | parent

Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.

Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.

bombcar 44 minutes ago | parent

Apparently they have the automated systems, but they were not working, so they were under human operating rules.

Which, in the USA at least, severely limits speed you're allowed to use (because once the only thing between you and gory death is a human, eventually that human makes a mistake).

thisismyanon2 19 minutes ago | parent

  People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC
Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.

bombcar 6 minutes ago | parent

There are definitely groups of people who hate the limited speeds of Amtrak, especially in the southwest corridor (the trains Amtrak runs there are capable of "technically high-speed (120 mph)" but can't do it because the freights haven't paid for the rails to be upgraded.

Everyone wants PTC installed, nobody wants to pay for it. Amtrak wants the railroads to pay for it. The railroads don't care about it because they run 50 MPH or less freights, so they want the government to pay for it. The government has no funding and wants Amtrak to pay for it. Amtrak reminds the government that Amtrak is just the government with a bad wig on, and the cycle continues.

And California keeps trying to build a high-speed rail for infinity billion dollars when the cost to PTC the entire LOSSAN corridor is only $250-500 million (and many agencies have done parts of it themselves already).

The state of US rail is entirely due to nobody actually giving a shit and there not being a central authority powerful enough to force it thought (because nobody gives a shit). Kind of the story of the USA in general.

Maken 50 minutes ago | parent

It's also a maintenance issue. The automatic control systems were offline and that's why they were manually controlling the trains.

Freak_NL 45 minutes ago | parent

Which is a valid fallback, but only with lower speeds. If someone made the call to go manual and continue at speeds over 30 km/h…

Foobar8568 1 hour ago | parent

It feels like every few years there is such collision in Spain :-/

aarroyoc 1 hour ago | parent

Last high speed train crash was just at the beginning of the year (Adamuz), with 46 casualties

VMG 1 hour ago | parent

the most recent crash with fatalities appears to be January 2026 https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260123-spain-train-coll...

Markoff 57 minutes ago | parent

more like 46 dead already

so much for European safety, now compare it to volumes on Chinese HSR and number of deaths there compared to Spain

edit: inconvenient truth for downvoters?

50 according one of the biggesr Spanish newspapers, just open the homepage, you can read 50 even in Spanish

https://www.abc.es

so thanks everyone for downvotes just because you use slow news sources or deny the truth EU high speed trains are extremely dangerous compared to China on deaths/volume

_heimdall 46 minutes ago | parent

No you likely got downvotes for claiming the yet to be known number of deaths.

I know there have been other Spanish train crashes in recent years but does you're pointing to all of Europe. Source?

Markoff 43 minutes ago | parent

https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/spain-train...

also one of the 3 major czech stations reporting at least 46

https://tn.nova.cz/zpravodajstvi/clanek/660035-srazka-rychlo...

if you open one of the biggest newspapers in Spain they report already 50 dead

https://www.abc.es

So thanks for giving me downvotes just because you use outdated news sources!

_heimdall 22 minutes ago | parent

The pompous snark likely won't help if you're concerned with down votes, but that's for the sources.

That leaves the Europe claims, as it stands your comparison would be Spanish railways vs Chinese.

bflesch 43 minutes ago | parent

Don't forget that several countries such as russia are waging hybrid warfare against the EU, there have been frequent sabotage acts against rail lines and cargo shipments. China is currently not targeted by russian hybrid warfare, and the US does not have a functional high speed rail system at all.

VulgarExigency 25 minutes ago | parent

Blaming Russia for a train crash in Spain is a level of psychosis I had never seen before.

dmpk2k 23 minutes ago | parent

What concrete evidence do you have that this crash, or the one earlier this year, was caused by the Russians?

You must have an incredibly high P(h)...

233mhz 22 minutes ago | parent

This Russian paranoia is more damaging than actual Russian operations at that point...

French riots? Russia

Spain train accident? Russia

Right wing party wins? Russia

Rainy weekend? Russia

thisismyanon2 17 minutes ago | parent

Acela was pretty successful at locking pax in the toilets.

jiwidi 54 minutes ago | parent

Another one.

The public minister of transport is still on his chair after the last ones. No responsability admited and blaming the far right for attacking him with media.

Is amazing how the current politic scene at spain has shittified, they get away with everything and ppl will still clap for them.

peri-cl 51 minutes ago | parent

El Pais is reporting they think it was a controller error,

https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/por-que-han-chocado-dos...

An automated system[*] had failed earlier this morning, so controllers were working manually.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung ("LZB")

[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."

Maken 48 minutes ago | parent

El Pais, English version: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...

jsrozner 46 minutes ago | parent

https://www.reuters.com/world/two-high-speed-trains-rear-end...

Says the Spanish train crash in Jan of this year that killed 46 was the "same operators on the same line."

Maken 40 minutes ago | parent

Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.

torben-friis 24 minutes ago | parent

Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.

Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.

vvillena 39 minutes ago | parent

The train operators do not seem to be a factor in either incident. Still too early to know what happened today, but the first findings point to an entirely different type of incident.

stevefan1999 44 minutes ago | parent

Just a few days ago Spain is still in riot mode. The next protest is going to be on 31th October apparently.

This is gonna add fuel to the fire, and as I lived in East Asia (Hong Kong to be specific) I'm kind of curious why it all happened around the eurozone lately.

France, Albania, Belgium, Spain, Greece, UK and Serbia recently (although it is not eurozone but closely related anyway as part of the great Balkans). What's left? Germany and Poland I guess?

Anyhow it really reminds me of the First World War

Angostura 41 minutes ago | parent

I can't see why you would think a train crash would "add fuel to the fire"

Markoff 35 minutes ago | parent

because it is symptom of Sanchez government, two high speed train crashes within a year, his minister not resigning, throw there high living expenses, no wonder Spaniards protest

theinfamousmobb 16 minutes ago | parent

Well said.

david-gpu 38 minutes ago | parent

From the article in El País:

> “A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident,” government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control — and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.

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.

One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.

Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.

wastedpotencial 35 minutes ago | parent

The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure. Hope this was the final straw we have to endure and they pay for their negligence at best, evil at worst in court.

Sorry to make a political statement with this tragedy, but the downgrade in Spain in recent years is just too much.

DEP and my condolences to the relatives and love ones.

JaumeGreen 29 minutes ago | parent

Not only it's a political statement but it's also one that's disingenuous.

The dismantling of public services, of which the maintenance of train tracks is part of it, has been done by all kinds of governing parties in Spain, and the cuts have been greater when a right wing government was in place.

To shift all the blame to just the latest ones in power is manipulative at best.

theinfamousmobb 17 minutes ago | parent

There's nothing manipulative here. Anyone that follows Spanish politics and it's not a political hoolingan can see this.

seviu 10 minutes ago | parent

Let me state some facts:

The current government has been in power for more than 8 years. Eight years. To deflect blame to a currently non existent right wing movement is real mental gymnastics on your end.

Close collaborators of the current president are in jail due to corruption, much of it from stealing from ADIF.

It's the second time in a year something like this happens.

All my thoughts go to the victims of this tragedy.

233mhz 23 minutes ago | parent

> The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure

I don't know of any country where this is not the case

andy12_ 27 minutes ago | parent

Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:

> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."

Very funny minister...

[1] https://www.lasexta.com/programas/cara-show-marc-giro/oscar-...

theinfamousmobb 7 minutes ago | parent

It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.

motionlessveloc 17 minutes ago | parent

Every year that passes, Japan's record of zero fatal high-speed train accidents since the Shinkansen was inaugurated in the 1960s becomes more and more incredible, with 10 billion passengers and counting.

(Excluding suicides/people falling on tracks, that is. And that one poor student in 1995 who got stuck in the door of a departing train and was dragged to his death.)