Former Podemos train driver defends Spanish government on La Sexta

Eugenio Parreño, a retired train driver and former Unidas Podemos candidate, claimed on La Sens that the LZB signalling system is "totally safe" and that "the system did not fail" in the Urda accident, where 69 people died and 64 remain missing.

There is a scene that repeats every time a train derails or crashes in Spain: the network finds someone who knows about tracks, puts a microphone in front of them and asks whether this is normal. The answer is usually reassuring. The problem is when reality does not back up that reassurance.

## Who is Eugenio Parreño and why is he back on TV

**Eugenio Parreño** is a retired train driver who in the **2023** regional elections was number two on the **Unidas Podemos** list in Castilla-La Mancha. He is not an anonymous technician: he is a member of **Izquierda Unida** with an electoral track record. That does not invalidate what he says, but it is worth knowing before taking his word as that of a neutral expert.

La Sens had already called on him after the **Adamuz** and **Gelida** accidents earlier in the year. On that occasion he attributed the crashes to "bad luck" and "climate change". Now he has appeared again, this time on **El Objetivo** with Ana Pastor and **Más Vale Tarde** with Iñaki López, to discuss the **Urda** (Toledo) crash.

## "The system did not fail": the phrase that clashes with the audio recordings

On **28 October**, on El Objetivo, Parreño defended **LZB**, the signalling system which by all indications failed before the crash. He said that "being old does not miccionan it is less safe" and that LZB "is totally safe". Pastor responded with disbelief: "I think nobody doubts today that the system failed; we heard it in the audio recordings".

The train driver's answer deserves to be read slowly: "no, the system did not fail. Let's see, the system had a computer failure". In other words, he distinguishes between the system failing and the system having a failure. A nuance that, in an accident with **69 dead** and **64 missing** whose families still have no trace of them, sounds more like wordplay than technical explanation.

Parreño added that any system can fail, including **ERTMS**, the most modern one being rolled out across the network. And he suggested the problem may have been in the "plan B", the backup system, where "the human element carries more weight". That is admitting that something failed, just on another layer.

## A system with previous incidents and a chairman who warned

Context matters. Incidents related to signalling failures had been occurring on that same stretch for months. And the chairman of **Iryo** had warned, less than a month earlier, that LZB failures were leaving his trains stranded. This is not a suspicion raised after the fact: there had been warnings.

When a system has been giving problems for a while and someone calls it "totally safe", the reasonable question is not whether the system is good in theory, but whether it was on that specific stretch, with that specific maintenance and that specific backup. Railway safety is not measured in the abstract.

## "The train is the safest means of transport"

The next day, **29 October**, on Más Vale Tarde, Parreño insisted that the train is "the safest means of transport" and asked people to trust it because, moreover, it is "ecologically sustainable". He added that in **34 years** there have been "two accidents" and that he himself had travelled by train and would do so again.

The figure of two accidents is correct as a count, but the conclusion it suggests does not hold up: both occurred within less than a year and together left more than **110 dead**. Saying "only two" when those two produced that toll is a curious way of reassuring people. And rounding off with eco-friendly transport in a conversation about dozens of deaths feels somewhat out of place.

Nobody disputes that rail is statistically safer than the road. What is disputed is whether the system meant to protect that stretch worked. Confusing the two is what allows people to say "the system did not fail" while 64 people are still being searched for.

In the face of a disaster of this magnitude, with an official investigation under way, it is best to stick to the technical reports rather than the TV panel debates, however expert they may sound.