Crash after crash on Spain's high-speed railways: maintenance gets only 16 percent of spending as the whole system faces questions

For decades, Spain's high-speed rail network was a symbol of national pride — a mark of modernisation and of the country's rise among Europe's leading economies. But Wednesday's deadly train disaster, coming only months after another mass-casualty rail crash in January, is turning that legacy into a political liability.

At least 69 people were killed in Wednesday's collision between two trains near Toledo. Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said on Thursday that the deaths of more than 100 people in two train accidents in the span of eight months raise serious questions about the integrity of the railway system, and that Spaniards deserve answers.

Spain's transport ministry says the preliminary investigation points to a chain of failures. After a computer malfunction knocked out the German-made signalling system installed in 1992, railway network officials took control and authorised a train to proceed along a track where another had stopped, causing the deadly collision.

Jaime Tamarit, a former director of a European railway-signalling certification laboratory, said the whole point of a train-protection system is to guard against human error, and that the failure of such a critical mechanism suggested the infrastructure is in a terrible state. More lines, he said, mean more staff and more spending on maintenance — but maintenance is politically invisible, so investment in it lags.

Investment in Spain's railways plunged during the financial crisis and the austerity years that followed. Although spending has since recovered, it remains well below its pre-crisis level in real terms.

According to European Commission data, between 2018 and 2022 Spain allocated an average of €1.5 billion a year to high-speed rail — more than France or Germany — but most of that money went toward new infrastructure. Maintenance, renewals and upgrades accounted for only about 16 percent of Spain's high-speed rail spending, compared with 34 to 39 percent in France, Germany and Italy.

Adif, Spain's railway infrastructure manager, has repeatedly defended the adequacy of its maintenance regime and insists it has always complied with safety requirements. The state-owned company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ana Miranda, a European Parliament lawmaker from Galicia's nationalist BNG party, accused Spanish authorities of failing to learn from past rail disasters, drawing parallels between Wednesday's crash near Toledo and the 2013 Angrois disaster in Galicia, which killed 80 people and injured 152.

The EU Agency for Railways concluded in a 2016 report that the investigation into the Angrois disaster had not met the required standards of independence and recommended a new inquiry. The European Commission subsequently launched infringement proceedings over wider shortcomings in Spain's railway safety oversight.

Miranda also said authorities had failed to conduct a sufficiently rigorous inquiry into January's Adamuz crash, which killed 46 people. An independent technical investigator assisting that probe has alleged that Adif altered accident reports; Adif denies wrongdoing and says it has cooperated with the judicial investigation.

The trains involved in Wednesday's collision were not using ERTMS, the European Union's standard rail-signalling system, which can automatically brake trains that exceed permitted speeds or fail to obey signals. Investigators have yet to determine whether ERTMS would have made a difference in Wednesday's crash.

Deployment of the latest rail safety technology across Europe remains far behind schedule. According to the European Union Agency for Railways, by the end of 2024 the European Train Control System — the core signalling component of ERTMS — was operational on only about 12,400 kilometres of track, roughly 10 percent of the EU's trans-European transport network. National plans aim to expand coverage to 40,000 kilometres by 2030, but an EU official doubted even that target would be met.

Among at least 69 people killed in Wednesday's collision was Fátima Báñez, who oversaw Spain's controversial 2012 labour reform. The crash has put the state of the railways at the centre of the campaign ahead of the November 29 snap election, undermining the prime minister's pitch that his government is competent and bettering Spaniards' everyday lives.