The CEO of Iryo denounced in the Senate 3 weeks ago that his trains took "a long time" to reconnect after the LZB failed

Three weeks ago, Fabrizio Favara, CEO of the Iryo company in Spain, appeared at the Senate's commission of inquiry into the state of the railway network in Spain and there he denounced that the main problem with the Madrid-Seville High Speed line — on which the tragedy occurred this Wednesday with at least 69 deaths — were the frequent crashes of the LZB safety system, failures that, he explained, forced the trains to stop and these took "quite a long time." to reconnect and start service again.

That is precisely what happened this Wednesday at the Urda station, Toledo. The driver of the Iryo that was detained after the LZB system service went down warned the control area of ​​its inability to get going again, after which it would be hit by an AVE that was traveling on the same track at high speed as a result of an order to resume "normal travel."

In the Senate, on October 5, Favara appeared in the Upper House and, asked about the main problems of the high-speed line between Madrid and Seville, he explained that after unpredictable situations such as fires, the "most frequent" problem is the failure of the LZB signaling system. Regarding this system, the CEO of Iryo in Spain points out that it is "safe but quite old", and that is when he says that "every time the train signaling has a disconnection from the ground signaling, the train stops, cannot move, and takes a long time to reconnect and start the service again."

This would explain why the Iryo train affected by the accident in Toledo had not moved from the Urda station, after the LZB failed.

In fact, the driver of the Iryo train that was hit by the AVE had begun conversations with the Adif control center at 8:38 a.m. to resume the march, although she herself indicated, as recorded in a recording, that at that moment the train is not allowing her to "restart the LZB system" and that "for this reason" she was "still stopped at the entrance signal" of Urda, in Toledo. Approximately ten minutes later, tragedy occurred.

The train drivers had also warned

The Union of Railway Machinists also points to the failure of the LZB system to fail in the section of the Madrid-Seville line, which has caused the trains to operate with the "substitute system" and they have warned that operating "in a degraded state cannot become a regular mode of operation in the event of breakdowns."