Passengers on two high-speed trains travelling from Madrid to Seville in Spain have described severe injuries and terrifying experiences after a collision. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
The incident occurred on Wednesday, 28 October, at around 08:30 (07:30 GMT). A train run by state-owned operator Renfe had 397 passengers on board, and ahead of it on the same line was a train of private operator Iryo with 147 passengers. A reported issue with the automatic signalling system — a computer failure — had forced all trains to halt on the affected stretch. Then, according to Spain's transport minister, the Renfe train was ordered to proceed in "error". It crashed into the back of the other train between municipalities Mora and Orgaz, about 140km (87 miles) south of Madrid.
Tangui Binier, 22, was in the Iryo train, in the front carriage, number eight, while his father was in number seven. Their train was one of six to have been ordered to stop at 08:30. A few minutes later, "the train started speeding, then it came to a sudden halt", Binier told the BBC. Baffled, he looked out of the window and saw "wires on the left side come down, and then there being just a lot of smoke behind us".
Spanish journalist Roberto Gómez was dozing on the high-speed Renfe train which had stopped more than 25km (16 miles) away from Binier's. It was a brief stop. A few minutes later, the train began to move again, he explained, and then the crash happened. He did not know that at 08:36 his train had been ordered to proceed with the journey and some 17 minutes later the "truly unbelievable" happened, Spain's Transport Minister Óscar Puente said. "The impact was terrible," Gómez told Onda Cero radio. "You can imagine, the carriage is completely destroyed. All the suitcases are all over the wrecked carriage." Gómez suffered only minor injuries but described another passenger falling on top of him and sustaining a deep gash on his head. "We were able to help people who had suffered severe blows to their chest and ribs," he said.
Rafael Barcelo was in one of the worst-affected carriages. A bruise on his forehead makes him one of the lucky survivors. He was having a coffee at the time of the crash and "felt a huge impact". "We were all thrown into the air," he told Reuters news agency at the site of the crash. "I am reasonably OK, my friend is quite worse." "I was travelling in coach seven, which is the one with more victims and the one most destroyed. I at least counted eight victims in that coach," he said, visibly shocked.
Even in the carriages farthest away from the impact on the Renfe train "everything was completely destroyed — the seats were detached, and most of the people who were travelling facing the same direction as the train were thrown into the air", according to Salvador Arriza. "It was something brutal," he said, describing how some people "were trapped between the seats". Once out, he saw how bad the situation was. "What caught my attention is that in one of the coaches there was a piece of train track that went through the roof of the coach, and I think that might have helped to stop or reduce the inertia of the train."