Abstract:
On the 29th local time, the Spanish Railway, Maritime and Civil Aviation Accident Investigation Agency released the first investigation report on the Toledo high-speed rail rear-end collision.
This major accident that occurred on the 28th was ultimately confirmed to have killed 69 people and left 50 injured hospitalized. It was one of the deadliest railway accidents in Spain in recent years.
According to the report, at 8:31 a.m. that day, the line signaling system was the first to malfunction, automatic safety protection failed, and the inter-regional trains were out of automatic control of the signaling system. There were no longer active warning and braking intervention by signaling devices, and dispatching could only rely on telephone and driver communication to transfer information. This emergency mode lacked a rigid safety barrier, laying the groundwork for fatal rear-end collisions.
The two high-speed trains that collided belonged to different operators. The front train was an Iryo train. It stopped on the line after a breakdown. The driver failed to restart the train twice and reported the danger of being stranded to the dispatcher. The rear train was a Renfe train of Spanish National Railways, traveling at high speed in an area without signal protection.
The report estimates that the speed of the car at the moment of impact reached 160 to 200 kilometers per hour!
The impact was extremely destructive. Car No. 8 of the national railway train was directly embedded in Car No. 1 of the preceding train. Two carriages overturned and fell down the embankment. Most of the carriages of the preceding train derailed, and the rear three carriages slid off the roadbed. Some carriages were pierced by deformed track debris.
According to previously exposed dispatch recordings,
After the signal system was paralyzed, the dispatcher illegally allowed the following vehicle to return to normal speed and failed to implement the safety regulations for low-speed visual passage in the fault section; even though the vehicle in front had reported that it could not move, the vehicle behind did not receive instructions to slow down or stop
.The investigation team will also retrieve train black boxes and complete dispatching call records, and continue to verify the root cause of signal failures, dispatching instruction processes, and personnel handling to see if there are any violations.
The Spanish Prime Minister has stated that he will thoroughly investigate all responsibilities for the accident and conduct a safety inspection of the national high-speed rail signaling system
.
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