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Authorities say at least 68 killed in train collision south of Madrid
Authorities said a high-speed train collision south of Madrid killed at least 68 people and injured scores more on October 28, with the death toll expected to rise.
Authorities said at least 68 people were killed and scores more injured when high-speed trains collided south of Madrid on Wednesday, October 28, 2026. They warned that the death toll was likely to rise.
A spokeswoman for the Castilla-La Mancha regional government said more than 100 people had been injured. Of those, 58 had been taken to hospital, including 15 in critical condition.
Transport Minister Oscar Puente said the collision followed an erroneous order for a train to proceed despite a technical failure in the automatic control system that had halted all services on a 69-km stretch.
Puente said the control centre had decided to resume traffic before the system was restored. He described the circumstances in which it restarted services as inexplicable from the ministry's perspective.
The Renfe train then travelled 25km before colliding with the stationary Iryo train, Puente said. He said its speed could have reached up to 200 kilometres per hour.
State railway operator Renfe confirmed that the main high-speed line from Madrid to southern Spain had been suspended after one of its services collided with a train operated by private Spanish company Iryo.
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At least 31 killed in central Spain train collision, authorities say
A high-speed train struck the rear of a stopped train in central Spain on Wednesday, derailing two cars, killing at least 31 people and injuring another 80, authorities said. The regional government of Castilla-La Mancha said the death toll had risen to 31.
The two high-speed trains were traveling in the same direction from Madrid to Seville. The accident involved state-owned RENFE and private rail company IRYO. There were 397 passengers on the RENFE train and 147 on the IRYO train, Padilla said.
Spain's rail system operator ADIF said the crash happened Wednesday morning in Toledo province. Rail service was suspended between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia. The cause of the crash was not known.
Manuel Galán, mayor of nearby Urda, said civil protection authorities had asked his town hall to prepare a sports pavilion to attend to passengers. He also said passengers had been injured.
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Spain works to identify victims of train collision that killed 69
Authorities in Spain were working to identify the bodies of 69 victims of a high-speed train collision on Friday, October 30. Relatives faced mounting anguish as they waited for news.
Castilla-La Mancha leader Emiliano Garcia-Page warned that more deaths could not be ruled out. Emergency services had collected 31 bags of partial remains, complicating identification. Legal authorities said 70 missing-person reports had been filed; those reports could correspond to recovered bodies, all but five of which remained unidentified.
Relatives have supplied DNA samples to help identify victims of Wednesday's crash in Castilla-La Mancha. Rescue crews were searching the wreckage while bodies were being examined in morgues.
The army established a temporary morgue in Toledo because the city's existing facility could not accommodate all the bodies.
A Renfe service struck the rear of a stationary Iryo train outside Urda, around 130 kilometers south of Madrid. A failure of the LZB automatic safety system had stopped all trains on a 63-kilometer stretch, but a control center authorized the Renfe train to resume its journey while the Iryo train remained stopped.
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