The railway tragedies in the Spanish High Speed system overlap and exceed the capacity of the Ministry of Transport to justify them as "strange" accidents, as was the case of Adamuz nine months ago or, on the same track, "unbelievable", like that of Urda, this Wednesday.
Railway safety is based precisely on the opposite, on the predictability of its systems and protocols distributed in layers that go from the tracks to the driver and personnel on board, passing through the train itself. Yesterday, starting at 8:30 a.m. in the corridor that connects Madrid with Seville, several of the security layers of the system failed, which has operated for more than three decades without recording the accidents that have occurred in the last nine months, with a death toll of more than 100, four of them train drivers.
The Iryo 6076 left Atocha for Seville with 147 passengers at 7:54 a.m. and 42 minutes later it warned that the LZB signaling system that locates it on the track had fallen. "At 8:38, our train, which had previously detected the problem and started to circulate in ASFA, stopped in front of a blank signal," sources from the Italian company indicated yesterday.
The system failure forced the train drivers to contact the Adif Regulation and Control Center (CRC) and stop the trains in circulation, at least six, in an area of 623 kilometers. In the case of the Iryo, it stops in Urda (Toledo), at kilometer point 117,800, next to sign 238 at the exit of a curve in clear terrain and with visibility conditions. The LZB system, which calculates in real time the position of the train, the maximum speed allowed and the distance to the next milestone, is the one implemented on a track that was "completely renovated" as indicated last January by Minister Óscar Puente after the Adamuz accident, and which yesterday recognized that it is an "old" system. It should have already been replaced by ERTMS because the renovation was put out to tender in 2021 and this work was awarded, but it has not been carried out.
The fall of the system was extraordinary in its magnitude. «Many times LZB transmission failures occur at a specific point, and when the trains pass through that point the failure occurs, you notify them and they give you the corresponding telephone number. In this case, all the trains that were on the section have been left hanging. A breakdown on such a long stretch affecting so many trains is not normal,” explains a train driver.
The first failure in the signaling system is a security failure, of a separate magnitude, relatively frequent and the machinists and operators of the Adif control center have protocols to address this type of incident. This protocol involves checking if the system works again to give instructions to the train drivers that they can resume moving and under what conditions to travel through a point or a "degraded" section that, sometimes, requires limiting the speed to 40 kilometers per hour to drive in "sightly movement."
The CRC is the second layer of security that comes into operation when the signaling system fails. But it is at this point in the communications between the operators of the Atocha control center and the detained train drivers that the system fails again, as revealed by the audios of conversations between known train drivers and controllers late in the afternoon. At 8:36 the controllers order the Renfe AVE, a Siemens series 103 that is stopped 25 kilometers behind the Iryo, to resume traveling "normally", that is, at the speed at which it is usually allowed to travel on the road.
Meanwhile, the driver of the injured Iryo train warned the control center that she was carrying out the reset of the signaling system and that she was not yet ready to resume travel. In the audios of the conversations, to which EL MUNDO has had access, the driver addresses the driver in these terms:
-"The train is not allowing me to restart the LZB system, that is why I am still stopped at the entry signal."
-"When you can and if you have problems, call us," they answer from the Atocha control center.
-"Okay, perfect, now I'll tell you." "Really, really," is heard on the other side of the conversation. "The 76," he adds, referring to the Iryo that was hit at full speed by the AVE, "is having problems with the equipment."
The control center gave the green light to the other train to resume running at normal speed when the Iryo still at least had not solved its problem of resuming the system. And it does so without setting the 40 kilometers per hour limitation established in cases in which the automatic signaling system does not work.
At first, the control center forces you to stop until you receive authorization. The conversation takes place at 8:41 minutes and it remains to be seen what other exchanges occur in the following minutes. At 8:48 the train lost contact with its operations center in Madrid.
The Italian operator indicates that at no time was it ordered to resume operation and that, in any case, the fact that its train could not move had to prevail over any safety decision.
It is in those minutes in which the Renfe AVE has already started up normally following the instructions given from the center in Madrid while the Iryo is still stopped on the road less than 30 kilometers away when the third failure of the security system occurs that finally triggers the tragedy. In the CRC audios leaked yesterday, it does not appear whether the conversation between the Iryo driver detained in Urda and the controller in Madrid continued beyond the driver's first warnings about the situation of her train and that it was impossible to move it.
The fact is that no one seemed to notice that a train was hurtling at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour onto the track occupied by another just a few minutes away. In that countdown of between 12 and 17 minutes in which the AVE was heading like a missile against Iryo's Hitachi, the CRC did not seem to intervene nor did the driver receive any type of information about the catastrophe towards which it was heading. The passengers on board the Renfe train indicated that they had not noticed any braking before the collision and the Iryo driver who was trying to reset her train indicated that the first news from the AVE was the impact she felt on the train she was driving. The CRC had not notified her and when minutes later the Civil Guard identified her and took an informal interest in what had happened, her response was, "The system has failed, the system has failed!"
