The Iryo that the AVE collided with underwent a comprehensive inspection two days before

The Iryo train against which a Renfe AVE train collided last Wednesday at the entrance to the Urda station (Toledo) had passed its last "comprehensive" inspection just two days before the accident, on October 26, in checks that also included the signaling system.

Sources from the company have specified that the last time maintenance was carried out on this train, that while stopped at the entrance to Urda, its tail car was hit by an AVE that had obtained permission to circulate normally, causing the accident that has cost the lives of 69 people and left nearly 200 injured.

The inspection was carried out at the Renfe workshop in Santa Catalina, in Vallecas, Madrid, which is one of the facilities that carry out heavy maintenance on the trains, on the Renfe trains and also, despite the Spanish operator, on the Iryo trains. The company also remembers that since it began operating on the Spanish High Speed ​​Railway it has increased its investment in maintenance of its entire fleet by 10%.

This Iryo train was one of those that stopped its operation at 8:36 a.m. last Wednesday, when the failure in the three computers at the Urda station that support it in that area caused the LZB signaling system to go down. In one of the audios between the driver and the Adif circulation center in Atocha, you can hear how she tells the regulator on several occasions that she cannot restart the LZB.

On this issue, Iryo sources do not fully clarify the reason, but they point out that this longer delay in resuming it could be due to the fact that the system outage on Wednesday of last week was along a stretch of 63 kilometers, longer than what is usually the most common.

What they do categorically deny are the explanations that have been heard these days in some television talk shows that the difficulties in reactivating the LZB by its driver were due to the fact that the Iryo trains are less adapted to working with this signaling system, instead of the ERTMS, which is the most widespread in the rest of Europe and also in Spain.

"Iryo uses exactly the same tools as the rest of the latest generation trains that operate on Spanish tracks," the company says. With the exception of Renfe's S100 model, which is the oldest series, both Iryo and Ouigo as Renfe trains can make "transmissions" from ERTMS to LZB or ASFA "automatically to guarantee safety and operational agility."