the leaked audio of the Adamuz accident between the Iryo and Atocha driver

“There’s no train coming.”

It is the key phrase of the audio that elDiario.es has been published exclusively and in which the conversation between the driver of the Iryo train and the command post is heard. The audio is extracted from the black box of the Italian train that, according to what is knownwould have derailed and seconds later would have been hit by an Alvia that was traveling in the opposite direction, being thrown to the side of the track and to the bottom of a four-meter embankment.

The conversation between the driver and the control center traffic has raised all kinds of speculation but, for now, it is part of an investigation that is expected to be very long and that can extend for months. Therefore, trying to conclude what happened or what elements caused the first and second derailments are mere speculation. In fact, the president of Renfe himself, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, pointed out in the first hours that could not be definitively stated that the Alvia train had collided with the Italian vehicle.

Audio and its implications

In the leaked audios, Iryo’s driver contacts the command center in Atocha to which he explains that he has had “a hitch” on the track. From there they ask him for a contact telephone number and to lower the pantographs, to which the driver responds that he has already carried out the operation. The pantographs are the elements that connect the train with the catenary and, therefore, with the electrical network.

A hitch occurs when there is a problem with the pantograph or catenary. In that case, the train is stopped and may suffer a strong deceleration, like a kind of anchor that prevents it from continuing to move forward. In fact, the driver himself explains in the audio that the train is completely blocked.

At that point, the communication is cut off and (if there is no skipped audio in between) the driver informs Atocha that has suffered a derailment and is occupying the adjacent track. At that moment, he requests that traffic be stopped immediately and from the command post they assure him that “there is no train arriving.” Next, the person in front of the Iryo train requests that they send emergency services, from ambulances to firefighters, because there is a car on fire and there are injured people on board.

The driver then reports that he is leaving the cabin and the audio cuts out.

From the audio it is striking that no reference is made to the Alvia (Renfe) train which, it is assumed, would have collided with the Iryo cars and subsequently derailed. Neither the driver nor the command center are aware that this has happened, which opens up two possibilities.

With no official information still on the table, what we have remains mere speculation. One possibility is that the impact of the Alvia occurred almost immediately after the derailment with the Iryo and hit it slightly but enough so that the driver, in a stressful situation trying to emergency brake his vehicle, did not notice it. A blow, however slight, at more than 200 km/h could have caused the second derailment and explains why the trains were found 700 meters apart.

If this is the case, it is also possible that the driver did not realize at first (in that period between communications in which he announces that he is going to verify the situation of his train) that there is a second accident vehicle because the distance and the fall to the embankment would have hidden the Alvia.

Two competing theories

This possibility is what the Minister of Transport himself, Óscar Puente, has pointed out. Initially, a time gap of about 20 seconds was targeted between the departure of the first Iryo and the impact of the Alvia. The proximity between both trains would not have allowed the security system warn of the obstacle on the track and stop the train. Now, Puente believes that barely nine seconds passed between the derailment of the Iryo and the impact of the Renfe train. The head of Transportation ensures This would explain why the driver is not aware that a second train has collided with his vehicle.

The other possibility is that the Alvia had not yet reached the accident area when the engineer contacted the command post on the second occasion. However, Puente has indicated that the second communication occurs “between three and four minutes after the first”. This means that, if the Alvia train had not collided or had not passed next to the Iryo at the time of the accident, it would have to be more than 13 kilometers from the event, which is the distance a train travels at 200 km/h in four minutes.

In Xataka We have contacted SEMAF (Spanish Union of Railway Machinists) who explain that the LZB system sends information with the position of the train to the command post. There, the train appears on a map like the one shown in this image uploaded by Minister Óscar Puente.

On this map you can see how the trains move forward, with their position updated every so often. On each line, they explain, there is a section manager who must remain attentive to the position of each train. For this reason, they say, there are several possibilities but they make it clear that the reasons can be multiple.

They explain that there are two possibilities that resonate more strongly. One of them is that the Alvia sent its position past Iryo’s vehicle almost immediately after the crash and from the command post they believed that no train was coming in the opposite direction, which is what was mentioned to the driver of the Italian train. The second is that the Alvia “disappeared” from the map due to Particularities of the LZB system or because damage had occurred on the track that cut off cable communications. In that case they would not explain how from the command post they did not notice that the point that signals the train would have disappeared.

Likewise, they remember that everything remains speculation for the moment and they focus on a possible treatment of the audio and the doubts as to whether three to four minutes really passed between the two communications from the Iryo driver, as stated by Transport. Likewise, they have announced that they will proceed to report the leak of the audios because they consider their use outside of the investigation to be illegal.

Photo | Oscar Puente and EMU

In Xataka | Cable thefts, downed trains, leaky tunnels and a tragic accident: the black year of high speed in Spain