Spain’s rail safety system went down before a crash that killed 69 — its transport minister calls 170 outages this year ‘normal’

Was Spain’s second major train collision this year caused by human error or does it show severe cracks in its once touted high-speed rail network?

Spain’s transport minister has laid most of the blame on a traffic controller’s poor judgment for Wednesday’s collision in Toledo province, which killed 69 people.

But railway unions have pushed back. They point to what they describe as deteriorating working conditions — fewer traffic controllers with more work than ever — that have made it increasingly difficult to ensure the safety of millions of passengers.

While the country searched for answers, police with sniffer dogs were still sifting through the wreckage on Friday. Regional authorities didn’t rule out that the death toll could still rise.

This was the second major crash on the Madrid-Seville line this year. In January, over two hours farther south, one train jumped the track and hit another going in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That crash is still under investigation.

“It is unacceptable that a country like Spain with such a strong high-speed railway has two accidents of this type in the same year,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Friday from the crash site near the town of Urda.

Spain’s high-speed rail network has been considered a success of state industrial policy. It is the world’s second-largest, after China’s. Until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service over three decades ago.

The timeline of the catastrophe given by the government

The chain of events that ended in disaster started at 8:31 a.m. on........

© Fortune