Unprecedented chaos on commuter rail: Renfe and Adif avoid setting a date for the return to normality

BarcelonaI live in the suburbs an unprecedented chaos. Service was scheduled to resume this Monday after 48 hours without trains and a chaotic week following the derailment in Gelida which cost the life of a young trainee driver. Early in the morning, Cercanías (commuter rail) began to "progressively" restart service, but half an hour after the start, two consecutive incidents at Adif's Centralized Traffic Center (CTC), located at Barcelona's França Station, prevented a return to normal service and forced the suspension of trains. Throughout the day, Adif and Renfe did not clarify the reasons for this failure nor rule out sabotage until the evening, when the Secretary of State for Transport, José Antonio Santano, stated that with the available information they were "99%" certain that a cyberattack was behind the technical failure.

The first system outage occurred around 6:30 a.m. A few minutes later, IT technicians activated the emergency or backup system.backup [in English] and this resolved the issue temporarily. At 7:25 a.m., still in the middle of rush hour, the CTC suffered a second failure, which added even more chaos and confusion to the resumption of service, especially among users who were in the stations and didn't know where they were going, since there was little information at the Renfe ticket offices, they point out. Half an hour later, service was restored again.

The rocky resumption of the commuter rail network led to situations of genuine bewilderment among users. Similar scenes were repeated throughout the country, with commuters running up and down to try to find transport to take them to work. "It's a disaster," Maria explained, panting, to ACN after running the 800 meters that separate the Mataró train station from the bus stop. "When I left home there were trains, but now there aren't any. So I had to run here to catch the bus," she explained.

In Martorell, both the R4 trains scheduled to depart for Terrassa and the buses of the alternative service set up for Sant Sadurní d'Anoia experienced significant delays. "Renfe is lucky we're not even outraged anymore. Since I left Gelida at six in the morning, they've changed the information three times, and I still don't know when I'll get to work in Sant Feliu de Llobregat," lamented Eva. "The PA system says one thing, and when you get to the platform, it's another. It's not right," said Fran Gómez from Girona. There, most passengers opted for alternative transportation such as cars or the AVE high-speed train.

Demonstration in Barcelona

However, both high-speed rail and road traffic also had a difficult Monday. A crack in a high-speed rail line in Tarragona forced the speed limit to be reduced to 80 km/h in some sections. This incident, combined with the snow accumulation on the Meseta plateau due to the storm, caused delays and a buildup of trains on the tracks. "Trucks are passing us," said Vicente from the dining car of the AVE high-speed train that had departed Madrid at 7:27 a.m. bound for Figueres. Four hours and forty minutes later, it had barely reached the Camp de Tarragona region.

The situation on the roads wasn't much better. The disruption to the commuter rail network and the lack of confidence in the trains' operation led to traffic jams on the approaches to Barcelona and in some other parts of the country. There have been significant traffic jams on the Ronda de Dalt ring road – where some access points have been temporarily closed – the Ronda Litoral ring road, the A-2, and the B-23. Additionally, on the AP-7 between Martorell and Gelida, the closure of two lanes since Saturday caused seven kilometers of southbound traffic jams. To address this widespread discontent, rail user groups have announced a joint demonstration to protest the chaos on the commuter rail network. It will take place in Barcelona, ​​although the date will be announced in the coming hours. The organizing groups hope that civil and economic organizations will also join the demonstration. "The situation on the commuter rail network is deplorable; it's a burden on the country's social and economic development," stated Adrià Allo, spokesperson for Dignity on the Tracks. He added that the rail service "has been progressively deteriorating in recent years" and that "the whole country is aware of this."

What is CTC?

But what exactly is the CTC, how does it work, and why is it key for the Cercanías commuter rail network? We're talking about the Centralized Traffic Center at França Station: it's the basic technological and computer system that acts as the nerve center of operations and keeps the entire Cercanías service running. It belongs to Adif, the state-owned company responsible for managing railway infrastructure. The CTC displays track conditions and train status, establishes routes, and manages traffic. Today it suffered two consecutive failures: these are infrequent "computer crashes," but when they happen, they bring the entire network to a standstill. "It's as if all the traffic lights in Catalonia turned red at the same time," explained Antonio Carmona, spokesperson for Renfe, the Cercanías operator. It's infrequent, but it's not the first time the CTC has gone down during service. In September of 2022, the system suffered another outage that also affected the entire commuter rail network, leaving thousands of passengers unable to board trains. In that instance, the outage primarily affected radio communications with the trains, and it was concluded that the error occurred during a system update. In 2015 another failure caused similar effectsIn both cases, the government deemed the situation unacceptable and demanded "guarantees" that the problems "would not happen again." For its part, the company assured that it would upgrade its technology and double its emergency systems to prevent these failures from taking hours to resolve.

Origin of the blackout

Adif has explained that they are still working and investigating to determine what may have caused the two failures this morning. Initially, company spokespeople stated that no hypothesis is being ruled out: neither an error on their own part nor the possibility of sabotage. The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, went a step further in his explanation during an interview on TVE: "The system crashed twice and recovered thanks to the backup, but the resumption of service was obviously hampered by this incident," he summarized. "We still don't know what happened, and all the hypotheses are being considered," Puente confirmed.

In the early afternoon, a press conference with the president of Renfe, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, and the president of Adif, Pedro Marco de la Peña, added some further details to the mystery. "We are reviewing all the physical evidence: signals, servers, computers... We have found absolutely no evidence of hardware theft, cable theft, or material theft," said the president of Adif. Marco de la Peña explained that they are keeping all hypotheses open regarding the two power outages this morning. "In the event of any security failure, the system locks down and protects itself," he said. At that moment, they decided to stop all trains for safety reasons, aware that "the system detected that it did not have secure control of the railway signaling." This time, Marco de la Peña said, "it is not a problem of investment, innovation, or technological obsolescence." For its part, the regional minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, admitted that the causes behind the technical failure are still unknown. "We are convinced that we will find out," he said in a press conference where he escalated his criticism of Renfe and Adif and demanded immediate dismissals. Paneque made these remarks just minutes before the Secretary of State for Transport, José Antonio Santano, confirmed the dismissal of the Cercanías (commuter rail) operations director, Josep Enric Garcia Alemany, and the Adif director general of operations and exploitation, Raúl Míguez. Santano also stated that they have ruled out "99 percent" that a cyberattack was behind the technical failure that caused unprecedented chaos on the Cercanías network. Finally, sources from Cercanías explained tonight that the expectation is that the train service planned for Monday will be available tomorrow: with 87% of the network running and the remaining 13% where passengers will have to use the alternative bus service.