The trains have failed again this morning. The Rodalies service is operating this Monday with widespread delays. Why?

Morning of delays on all Rodalies lines on the eve of a week of work stoppages in the rail service. Renfe sources have specified that there are "incidents related to train drivers and trains" that are being analyzed, as reported by the ACN, while the director of Rodalies de Catalunya, Òscar Playà, stated on Catalunya Ràdio that the situation has to do with the context of "strike" and "conflict" currently experienced in the sector regarding safety, and President Salvador Illa has reproached the "attitude" of the train drivers. Starting this Tuesday, three consecutive days of strikes are called: two for train drivers and a general strike on Wednesday. Over the weekend, however, there were already delays of up to an hour on Rodalies.

The Spanish government is taking a step forward to respond to both the safety of the railway network and the victims of the tragic accident in Urda, in the province of Toledo. The President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, had already hinted a few hours after the collision between the two trains at the intention to approve measures to reinforce high-speed safety. A service that, in the words of Sánchez himself, has been "hit" after experiencing two tragedies in less than a year; the one in Toledo and the one in Adamuz (Cordoba) last January. "The goal is to recover [the public's] confidence in the train," government sources insist.

"To make a comparison, it's like an airport control tower," describes a source from the railway sector who has visited the Atocha railway control center numerous times. A gigantic screen, from one end of the wall to the other, and in the middle the different workstations. And a lot of silence. That is the Adif room from where the railway traffic managers work, which has been under the media spotlight since Wednesday. A few hours after the accident between two high-speed trains in Urda, in Toledo, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, publicly came out to point out that the problem had been a human errorcommitted from one of these rooms. Specifically, he pointed to the order that a traffic manager gave to the driver of the AVE train that later collided with the Iryo train: "Resume travel as normal".

The tragic railway accident in Urda, in the province of Toledo, which has already left about seventy fatalities, has sparked unrest among railway workers, controllers, and train drivers, especially after this Wednesday the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, pointed directly to the "human error" of an operator in the Adif control center room.

We have been talking about nothing but the train accident in Toledo for 24 hours now, where 68 people have died as of yesterday, for the moment. So I take all the preliminaries as read. Political consequences: trains in Toledo, where 68 people have died as of yesterday, for the moment. So I take all the preliminaries as read. Political consequences: Óscar Puente cannot continue to be minister of Transport for even one more minute. This year 2026, 115 people have been killed on Spanish trains: 46 in Andalusia, 1 in Gelida and 68 in Toledo. And one accident is a tragedy. Three accidents with 115 deaths are not just three tragedies. They are the system.

"We need to broaden the focus. How many parts have failed?". This is asked by a union voice in the railway sector who, like many other workers, has not yet recovered from the tragic train accident in Urda, Toledo, which has caused at least 69 fatalities. They have lost a colleague – the driver of the Renfe train –; the trainee who was accompanying him remains missing, and they have expressed their unease over what they consider a direct finger-pointing by the Ministry of Transport at the operator of the Adif regulation and control center (CRC) in Atocha, who has been placed in the spotlight regarding the cause of the accident.

The tragic train accident in Urda, in the province of Toledo, has resulted in dozens of injured and fatalities. An investigation has now been opened – it corresponds to the civil and instruction section of the Court of First Instance of Orgaz (Toledo), in square number 2 – which, taking into account the precedents of the latest railway accidents, such as the Adamuz accident, is expected to be prolonged over time.

The unfortunate chain of technical failures and human errors that ended in the collision of two high-speed trains in Urda, Toledo, opens up many questions about how it could have happened and what technical factors could explain a disaster of these characteristics. Transport sector expert and director of the Terminus Transport Studies Centre, Joan Carles Salmerón, clarifies technical terms and the main unknowns still surrounding the accident for the ARA. There are six questions to provide context and understand key concepts.

At 8:54 in the morning, Nicolás was listening to music sitting in the sixth carriage of an AVE train heading to Seville to visit his girlfriend. He makes this journey three or four times a month. But today was different. All of a sudden, the seats were dislodged, a group of people fell together, they ended up crushed and he could not move. “I looked and I realized that I was on the opposite track. It was like Adamuz. I got up and tried to open the door,” he remembers in conversation with ARA. But, with the impact, he had lost his glasses and could not read the instructions, so he had to ask for help from the other passengers. “When I got out, I could hear the screams from the seventh carriage, which was destroyed. And I saw two people on the ground who were begging me while crying to let them have my mobile to call their family. One could not move and I had to hold the phone for him,” he recounts.

Second railway tragedy in Spain in less than a year on the line between Seville and Madrid, which already ranks as one of the most tragic accidents in the state's railway history. This Wednesday, two high-speed trains, one Renfe AVE and another from Iryo, collided a few minutes before 9 a.m. in Urda, in the province of Toledo. The latest toll of victims stands at 68 dead, and more than a hundred injured admitted to hospitals, according to the government of Castilla-La Mancha. The final number of victims and missing persons, however, is still unknown and authorities fear it will continue to rise.

The National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) has urged Renfe to allow Ouigo to use its workshops in Cerro Negro/Santa Catalina and Fuencarral (in Madrid) and in Can Tunis (in Barcelona), because it considers that these are commitments agreed upon between the two companies.

Renfe has already begun the tasks to dismantle the train that caught fire on Monday on the high-speed line between Barcelona and Madrid and which has kept this corridor running at half capacity since then. The work to remove this part of the train, the most complicated one, began on the night between Thursday and Friday. Once cleared of scrap metal, it will be necessary to check the condition of the track and the catenary and, if necessary, repair it. Nevertheless, the infrastructure manager, Adif, is maintaining the planned schedule and expects that the line will be able to return to normal next week. Even so, at this time neither Renfe nor Adif can specify which exact day it will be possible to return to circulating on both tracks.

The railway chaos due to the fire on a high-speed train continues this Tuesday morning. Train circulation resumed yesterday, after being halted all afternoon, but trains can only run on a single track in a specific section in Aragon, which greatly complicates the mobility of the trains and the more than 11,000 passengers affected yesterday.

Over the last ten days, the Catalan railway network has relived the nightmare of January. A new storm tested the infrastructure and forced the suspension of all train services on Saturday evening. Since then, incidents and a new strike by train drivers have meant that the recovery of service has been gradual and uneven. Nevertheless, the Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, stated this Friday that the network had responded "reasonably well" this time, and linked it, in part, to the 140 million invested after the January crisis to repair the infrastructure. This is the current state of the network, line by line:

The former director and historic spokesperson for Rodalies Renfe in Catalonia, Antonio Carmona, is now joining Adif: he will go from managing trains to coordinating infrastructure in Catalonia. This is stated in a resolution from Adif's public procurement portal. Carmona will be the new coordinator of the Rodalies de Catalunya network, meaning he will be in charge of promoting the development and full operability of the Catalan railway network.

This disaster of Rodalies and Adif in Catalonia is no longer about an investment problem that requires years of work to recover from decades of neglect. The problem is that Rodalies is not a real entity with a common project, but a scattered set of tracks, catenaries, trains, unions, companies, and governments, with everyone only concerned with their own piece. At the risk of it being too early for metaphysics, the problem with Rodalies in Catalonia is that it has no soul. Those who work there with a spirit of service must not have power, and those who have power must not have a spirit of service.

New day of collapse at Rodalies. A wildcat strike by train drivers, as already happened last winter after storm Harry, has once again caused chaos on the Catalan railway network this Wednesday. A good number of the train drivers did not board the trains this morning, citing safety reasons after the heavy torrential rains that have fallen these days and, especially, after a tree and an embankment fell onto a train in Vilanova i la Geltrú on Tuesday night, without causing any injuries. The operator, Renfe, explained early on that there were "some trains" running "but not at 100%". They did not report, however, which trains were running and which were not, nor where they were passing, and directly recommended that users seek "alternative means".

First they said they would be ready in 2025. Then, in the summer of 2026 and later, at the beginning of 2027. Now, however, the schedule is delayed until the spring. The new trains that Alstom is manufacturing for Rodalies are taking a while to arrive. This was admitted this Thursday by the Secretary of State for Transport and Mobility, José Antonio Santano, in a talk at the Cercle d'Economia in Barcelona.

Portbou has the last train station in Catalonia before crossing the administrative border with France through the Belitres tunnel. The station and the entire complex of tracks occupy nearly a third of the surface area of this small municipality on the Costa Brava, linked since the 19th century to the country's railway history. Inside the Portbou facilities there is a workshop, the only one of Renfe in the Girona region, where maintenance and repair tasks for locomotives and freight trains are carried out. Over time, however, this base has been losing weight and personnel, until, finally, Renfe has decided to stop its activity.