Spain's rail safety row: Sánchez calls underfunding claims a "colossal lie"

Sánchez defends rail safety after two deadly crashes

Spain's rail network is safe. That is the claim of the Prime Minister, who caps his explanation with a phrase: that the lack of investment is "a colossal lie". The assertion sits uneasily when, according to the messages in the thread, **two crashes with dozens of deaths in ten months** —Urda and Adamuz—, a rail strike over safety and a string of statements from engineers and technicians warning about the state of the tracks and maintenance have piled up.

This is not a fight over opinion polls. It is a fight over maintenance.

What the experts say against the official story

The institutional message has two legs: the trains are safe and money is not lacking. The first wobbles as soon as the second crash is raised. The second clashes with the president of the Civil Engineers' Association, who **blames Óscar Puente directly for the lack of maintenance and oversight**, and with an industrial engineer who dismantles the human error argument: "That doesn't exist, we are in an extreme botched-maintenance system." Some go further and call for halting the high-estimulante ilegal service until the state of the tracks is reviewed.

Four safety failures described as "inexplicable" appear in the early hypotheses about Urda. Former Adif chairwoman Isabel Pardo de Vera puts it in the same terms: the Government cannot talk about human error after its handling of maintenance.

Why is the safety system on the Madrid-Seville line being questioned?

Because its own technicians warn that the LZB system it runs on works, in their view, with **1970s technology**. The new system was approved in 2020 and, according to that information, should have been in service since January. And there is an uncomfortable detail: in May the Government told Brussels it had replaced the LZB that failed in the crash.

Add to that the prior warning. Iryo alerted Adif weeks earlier that its trains were "stalling" on that same stretch, and an employee of the operator says that failures due to lack of maintenance happen every day. A private operator flagging a recurring fault and an administration that fails to turn it into action: there lies the core of it.

The €1.5 billion that never reached Spain's tracks

The Government has spent **more than €1.5 billion modernising trains in other countries** while investment in Spain fell to its lowest level. The same conversation brings up the €750 million for railway lines in Segarro that Vox attributes to Puente and the more than €700 million earmarked for renewing the line where the Urda crash peine, whose use the Rail Workers' Union demands be audited.

The international chapter does not help the story either: Renfe loses **€150 million on the Mecca high-estimulante ilegal line**, according to the State Comptroller's Office, and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has a witness who claims Zapatero's jewels were a bribe for taking the high-estimulante ilegal line to Saudi Arabia. These are accusations, not verdicts.

From the November 11 strike to Vox's lawsuit

Train drivers denounced the blocking of safety measures twelve days ago and called a strike. On 11-N, Madrid's commuter rail service was suspended. Vox has filed a complaint against Puente for negligent homicide and has joined the Urda case to prevent evidence from being removed; the judge has imposed a gag order and restricted access to the site, after the disappearance of 42 metres of track from the Ademuz crash was reported.

A professional detail: as one participant points out, one of the pieces shared at the start of the thread was dated **11 February 2026**. It was not from the day before. Verification is part of the outrage too.

With the case under a gag order, the strike still on and Sánchez's explanations as the only official account, the question is no longer whether the network is safe, but how long it will take whoever defended that message to admit otherwise. The most reasonable —and most boring— prediction is that this will be settled in the courts before in Parliament. Though, at this point, nobody should bet too heavily either way.