Spain rail crash came after train ordered to go in error: Minister

• Spain’s rail crash killed at least 64 people after a train was wrongly ordered to resume service, Transport Minister Oscar Puente said.
• A 69km outage of the automatic control system stopped all trains, but the control centre restarted traffic before the system was fixed.
• A Renfe train then travelled 25km and hit a stationary Iryo train at up to 200 kilometres per hour, raising fresh rail safety concerns.

URDA, Spain - A rail collision in Spain that claimed at least 64 lives on Oct 28 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.

Transport Minister Oscar Puente said 69km 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 centre, and the control centre... 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 travelled 25km until it collided with a stationary train belonging to private Spanish company Iryo, at a speed that could have reached “up to 200 kilometres per hour”, Puente added.

“It is clear that, in the control centre, 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. AFP