Speeding was the main suspect yesterday in a rail disaster in Spain that killed 80 people and left more than 140 injured but the reliability of the track security system is also being questioned.
The train flew off the tracks on a curve late Wednesday as it was about to enter Santiago de Compostela station in the northwestern region of Galicia, causing carriages to pile into each other and overturn.
Wrecked trains are always an unsettling sight. But a train crash at 200kph, like the one in Santiago de Compostela, goes beyond even our usual expectations.
You could tell that something really horrible had happened once the first pictures arrived: few people were able to walk out from the train. The train driver was among the survivors. When he was pulled out the wreckage, he was found mumbling: “We are all humans, we are all humans.” The man has since admitted that he had been driving at more than twice the speed limit. But his first pronouncement sums up better the cause of this accident. We’re all human.
Even if human error seems for now to be the direct cause of this accident, other questions will be asked once the shock subsides.
Trains have always been a Galician obsession. Galicia was left out from the new railway network when it was initiated in the late 80s, and, like a century before, society, the media, and local and regional politicians voiced their outrage. The works to build the high-speed network began with a decade’s delay.
Of course, this was part of the building frenzy of the 1990s that is regretted so bitterly in the current economic crisis. “Spanish high speed”, as it is commercially known, is not just an example of Spain’s economic boom in those years. It is also its perfect metaphor: modernity and velocity, all in one. Experts agreed that it was all very safe.
The sceptics were few and far between. Galicia, they said, didn’t really need a high-speed passenger train to Madrid, but a better regional railway network to connect its widely dispersed population. They were met with contempt.
The bend where this accident happened has a story to tell: it is noticeably sharp, a typical product of Spain’s landscape. There were arguments for having that section of the route remade completely, but Galicia’s particular land tenure regime makes expropriations an administrative nightmare. So the bend was left as it was, and speed was limited there to 80kph. This should have been enough had the train stuck to the rules. Reducing to 80kph from 200 in a few seconds was the driver’s job. Not an easy one, though.
Ominously, the very day the line was inaugurated in 2011, many passengers noticed a strange shock when entering that bend. Spaniards should have listened to their geography, but all were united in their enthusiasm.