Survivors of Spain’s worst train crashes urge action after latest disaster

Madrid, Spain – “I survived but the mental scars are still there all these years later. We must stop more accidents happening,” says Cristobal Gonalez. Gonzalez suffered multiple injuries when a high-speed train, which should have been travelling at 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour), hurtled off the line at 200km/h (125mph), killing 80 people. The accident in 2013 at Angrois, near Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, remains Spain’s deadliest rail crash. On Wednesday, 13 years later, at least 69 people were killed when two trains collided near Urda, a town close to Toledo in central Spain. Only 10 months earlier, two other trains collided on the same line, in Adamuz near Cordoba in southern Spain, killing 46 people.