"It was as if the floor of the first carriage had disappeared": the witness of one of the passengers of the train that crashed in Gelida

Helida"There was a very sudden stop and we were all thrown about," recalls David Castelló shortly after the R4 train he was traveling on derailed near Gelida. The accident, which occurred around 9:00 p.m., has It left one dead and 36 affected, 5 of whom are seriously injured.Initial hypotheses suggest that a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks, and the train traveling towards Manresa crashed into it between the Sant Sadurní and Gelida stations. David was returning home from work and was traveling in the third carriage of the train involved in the accident. In fact, his stop was the very next one. "I must have been in the third carriage, and there was a woman standing who I saw was seriously injured," he explains. He recounts how, after the collision, they managed to open the carriage doors "to let some air in," and then everything went dark. "We leaned out the doors and saw a train coming in the opposite direction. Some of us jumped out, started waving, and finally it stopped," Castellón narrates. "We got to the front of the train, to the first carriage, and we could hear cries for help."

"It was as if the entire floor of the first carriage had disappeared, as if it were suspended in mid-air, with people there in the middle," he describes what he saw when he reached the front of the train. "It was very shocking to reach the front of the train and see that there was no train anymore and people were screaming," he acknowledges. He also admits that at that moment he "froze" and found it difficult to help, although he did give his jacket to one of the passengers who was in the worst condition.

"Eternal" wait

Now, three hours after the accident, David admits it's difficult to calculate the time that passed between noticing the collision and seeing help arrive. "Access was incredibly difficult. I don't know if it was 20 minutes or half an hour, I don't know... But the wait felt endless until we saw the firefighters, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), and the emergency services," he recounts. Although David escaped the collision unharmed, he was taken to a field hospital in the Cavas Torelló area of ​​Sant Sadurní d'Anoia. "They were fantastic, absolutely fantastic," he says.