Everything that went wrong with Spain’s high-speed railways

For decades, Spain’s high-speed rail network had been a source of national pride, symbolizing the country’s rapid modernization and its rise among Europe’s leading economies.

But Wednesday’s deadly train disaster — following another mass-casualty rail crash in January — is turning that legacy into a political liability and putting the state of the railways at the center of the campaign ahead of the Nov. 29 snap election.

“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,” opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said Thursday, adding that Spaniards “deserve answers.”

Those answers are hard to find. Experts point to human error, maintenance issues, austerity and EU-level rail safety reform as all having played their part in the deaths of at least 69 people near Toledo on Wednesday.

Spain’s transport ministry says the preliminary investigation points to a chain of failures. After a computer malfunction knocked out the German-made signaling system installed in 1992, railway network officials took control and authorized a train to proceed along a track where another had stopped, causing the deadly collision. Jaime Tamarit, a former director of a European railway-signaling certification laboratory who helped oversee the development of the pan-European system meant to prevent railway accidents, said the system failure revealed the grave state of Spain’s high-speed rail network.

“The whole point of a train-protection system is to guard against human error,” he said, adding that the failure of such a critical mechanism suggested, “the infrastructure is in a terrible state.” 

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

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 about 16% of Spain’s high-speed rail spending, compared with 34% to 39% in France, Germany and Italy, according to European Commission data.

“If you have more train lines, you need more staff, and to spend more on maintenance,” Tamarit said.

The safety expert attributed the apparent lack of investment to political prioritization that values flashy new construction over maintaining existing infrastructure. “Maintenance is vital — but also politically invisible,” he lamented.

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 Angrois accident is happening again,” she said, arguing that the government of then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had focused on human error while failing to adequately address the technical and systemic issues that may have contributed to the disaster.

“In the Angrois case they singled out the driver, and now they’re trying to do the same with the control workers,” Miranda said. “We need to get to the root of the causes, and that requires investigations.”

The EU Agency for Railways reached a similar conclusion in 2016, when it issued a report finding 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 said authorities had also failed to conduct a sufficiently rigorous inquiry into January’s Adamuz crash, which killed 46 people. An independent technical investigator assisting the probe has alleged that Adif altered accident reports, while questions have also emerged over documentation relating to inspections of track welds on the stretch where the crash occurred.

Adif denies wrongdoing and says it has cooperated with the judicial investigation.

For Miranda, the repeated controversies point to a failure spanning successive governments. She accused the country’s two dominant parties — the center-right People’s Party, which was in power at the time of the Angrois crash, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's center-left Socialists, who have governed Spain since 2018 — of maintaining a “pact of silence on high-speed rail.”

“They had enough time to implement rules,” she said. “How easy is it to blame the worker when nothing has been done to change things?”

Wednesday’s crash highlights a wider European challenge: replacing fragmented national signaling systems with modern technology while maintaining aging infrastructure. 

The trains involved in the deadly collision in Toledo were not using ERTMS, the European Union’s standard rail-signaling system, which can automatically brake trains that exceed permitted speeds or fail to obey signals. Spain’s post-pandemic recovery plan included investments to modernize railway signaling and traffic control, including the deployment of ERTMS. The Madrid–Seville line was also due to be equipped with the system under a separate signaling-renewal project authorized in 2020, but the upgrade remains incomplete.

Investigators have yet to determine whether ERTMS would have made a difference in Wednesday’s crash.

Deployment of the latest railway safety technology across Europe remains far behind schedule. By the end of 2024, European Train Control System technology — the core signaling component of ERTMS — was operational on only about 12,400 kilometers of track, roughly 10% of the EU’s trans-European transport network, according to the European Union Agency for Railways.

National plans aim to expand coverage to 40,000 kilometers by 2030, out of roughly 63,000 kilometers the EU wants equipped across the bloc. But an EU official said they doubted even that target would be met on time.

Politics has been part of the problem, the official said, with countries having “different reasons for not adopting the system” and Brussels allowing national systems to remain in place for years. “It was only in 2024 when we actually said ERTMS is going to be the single European system,” the official added.

The EU aims to have ERTMS installed on 57% of its main rail corridors by 2030 — but that target increasingly seems out of reach. 

Rail lobbies in Brussels say funding for signaling and network upgrades is insufficient. But these concerns have only sharpened after the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU proposed cutting the Connecting Europe Facility by 14% from the Commission’s original proposal in its latest negotiating document for the bloc's next seven-year budget.

Further safety improvements could be undermined by cuts to EU research programs. Indeed, a draft of the new Horizon Europe structure under the next long-term budget, seen by POLITICO, could cut rail research entirely — even though that research is what underpins the ERTMS blueprints the industry will have to adopt.

The official added that companies won’t expand production without knowing that “there are contracts for next year.”

Despite the obstacles, the European Commission is trying to accelerate the rollout of the safety mechanisms.

Last September, industry and policymakers gathered in Brussels to discuss an “ERTMS Deal” aimed at standardizing technical requirements, speeding up approvals and encouraging deployment through EU funding. 

But the technical blueprint underpinning the plan is still being developed, with an initial batch of results expected by the end of 2027 and some elements requiring further testing and validation. 

That leaves little time before the EU’s 2030 deployment targets. For an industry seeking to expand production, the official said, the uncertainty itself is an obstacle for companies that ultimately need to know “there are contracts for next year.”

Delays in improving rail safety remain a challenge across Europe. The deadly crash on the line between Madrid and Seville is a stark reminder that the stakes of getting those improvements right are measured in human lives.