Second stop of all Rodalies in a few hours due to an Adif incident

BarcelonaCatalonia's railway network has been paralyzed for the second time in a single day. If this Tuesday at noon trains in the Barcelona area were suspended for half an hour due to an incident at the Traffic Control Center (CCT) in Barcelona, Adif has reported that traffic has been interrupted again, in this case throughout Catalonia, for reasons that technicians are investigating. The events occurred at 3:30 PM. Both stops were brief and technical teams were able to restore service a few minutes after publicly reporting the general breakdown.

According to the infrastructure administrator, Adif, the first failure occurred at 12:25 PM. The service was stopped due to an incident in the traffic regulation systems, from which signals, switches (track changes), catenaries, and other key elements for train operation are supervised in real time. Until the technicians could solve the problem — around 1:00 PM — and it was verified that traffic could resume safely, the operator, that is, Renfe, had to suspend the service of the lines operating in Barcelona. The second stop was shorter than the first.

As a consequence of these two failures, frequencies and timetables have been altered. The morning incident, which was longer, affected lines R1, R2, R3, R4, R8, R11, R14, R15, R16, R17, RG1, RL3, RL4, RT1, RT2. According to Adif, from 1:00 PM, the service began to be restored "progressively", but the Rodalies network is experiencing generalized delays of up to 30 minutes, according to Rodalies. When there is a system failure, the entire railway operation is altered in a chain reaction.

The Minister of Territory and Government spokesperson, Sílvia Paneque, pointed out at noon that the incident could be due to the implementation of new security software. In a press conference this Tuesday after the executive council, she explained that the Renfe and Adif operations centers are currently being unified, and that in this process a new Siemens security software is being implemented that has generated "some problems that the company is already adjusting", and she stated that the system will be much more secure when it is fully implemented.

"Surely when I leave I will have information about what caused this case, but unfortunately the implementation of this new system is giving us some problems," he said at the press conference, which coincided with the moment of the incident and the start of the service recovery. Paneque warned that there will be some delays in train circulation while the incident is resolved. "We are working to prevent these incidents from happening again," he assured. Regarding the afternoon incident, there is still not much data at the moment. Adif has limited itself to saying that "technicians are gathering information".

The incidents coincide with the arrival of Leo XIV in Barcelona, an event for which Renfe had designed a reinforcement plan on the Commuter lines with 35% more seats.