Spain train crash kills 68 after control center mistakenly resumes traffic: minister

A rail collision in Spain that claimed 68 lives on Wednesday came after a train was ordered to go in "error" despite a technical failure that halted all services, the transport minister said.

The first findings about the accident in the central region of Castilla-La Mancha are likely to revive questions about rail safety in Spain after another high-speed collision in January killed 46 people.

Emergency services work at the site of a train crash between two high-speed units, a Renfe AVE train and an Iryo train around 150 km south of Madrid between Urda and Los Yebenes in the province of Toledo, on Oct. 28, 2026. Photo by AFP

Transport Minister Oscar Puente said 69 km (43 miles) of track were affected by an outage of the automatic control system, which "caused all the trains that were running at that time to stop automatically".

"The decision to resume traffic, while that system had not been restored, belongs to the control center, and the control center... took the decision to resume traffic in circumstances that, from our point of view, are inexplicable," Puente said.

A train operated by state company Renfe restarted and traveled 25 km until it collided with a stationary train belonging to private Spanish company Iryo, at a speed that could have reached "up to 200 km per hour", Puente added.

"It is clear that, in the control center, the decision was taken to restart, and then they had more than enough time to verify the error, and they did not fix it," Puente said.