Experts investigating the cause of a high-speed train derailment in Spain that killed at least 40 people have found a broken joint on the tracks, according to a source familiar with the initial investigation into the crash.
Derailed carriages hit an oncoming train, pushing it off the tracks and down an embankment, in one of Europe’s worst rail accidents in modern times.
Technicians on the ground, analyzing the rails, identified wear at the joint between the rail sections, known as a fishplate, which they said indicated the defect had existed for some time, the source said.
They found that a faulty joint had created a gap between the rail sections that widened as the trains continued to pass along the line. The source, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said technicians believe a faulty connection is key to determining the exact cause of the accident.
Álvaro Fernández Heredia, the president of Renfe, which operates the second train that derailed, told Cadena Ser radio that it was too early to talk about the cause. However, Sunday’s accident occurred under “strange circumstances”, adding that human error was virtually ruled out.
“The first wagons of the train operated by the Spanish company Iryo went over the gap on the rails, but the eighth, last wagon jumped off the rails, pulling the seventh and sixth wagons with it,” said the source.
Iryo is a private railway operator, majority owned by the Italian state railway group Ferrovie dello Stato.
The source pointed to a photograph showing a gap in the vertical rail, which was also published in material shared with the media by Spain’s Guardia Civil. The area is marked with police numbers while it is photographed by forensic inspectors.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Transport Minister Óscar Puente were among the officials who visited the crash site on Monday. Sánchez canceled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Puente said the Iryo train is less than four years old and the railroad was completely renovated last May.
The train’s manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, inspected the train on January 15 as part of routine maintenance and found no irregularities, a source told Reuters.
The train is a Frecciarossa 1000 model, the same one used on the Italian high-speed train network.
