César Sánchez

Japan has spent 62 years perfecting what high speed railway safety looks like. - Since 1964, Japan has built over 3,200 km of high-speed rail, operating trains at up to 320 km/h and carrying approximately 380 million passengers annually. - Its busiest corridor runs nearly 400 trains daily, averaging just 1.4 minutes of delay. Yet across six decades, not a single passenger has died in a Shinkansen collision or derailment. Think of that for a moment. Now consider Spain. - In 2013, 80 people died when a train entered a curve at excessive speed. This January, another 46 died in a disaster linked to a suspected rail fracture. Today, at least 68 more have been killed near Toledo. - The failures have differed. In 2003, conflicting movement authorisations contributed to a collision killing 19. In 2006, a train entered a 30 km/h turnout at approximately 125 km/h, killing seven. In 2013, automatic protection failed to prevent catastrophic overspeed. - Today's accident is especially troubling. Around 08:30 am, Spain's LZB train protection system malfunctioned. Six trains automatically stopped, exactly the response intended to prevent a collision. - But minutes later, a control centre reportedly authorised a Renfe train to resume normal movement despite a red signal and another train remaining stationary ahead. Restricted operation should have limited it to approximately 40 km/h. Instead, the train accelerated to nearly 200km/h and rear ended the Iryo train from behind. - Modern railways depend on multiple safeguards. A signalling failure should not automatically become a collision. Speed restrictions, automatic protection and operational procedures are supposed to prevent one failure from becoming another. - This is what makes Spain's history so concerning. The initiating causes range from human mistakes to suspected physical defects, yet several disasters raise questions about why the remaining protections were insufficient. Whether those weaknesses share an institutional cause that leads to such failures. - Japan has experienced derailments, equipment failures and human mistakes too. But its safety architecture, preventive maintenance, rigorous operating procedures and continuous learning have helped contain failures while moving hundreds of millions of people every year. Japan's achievement is not that nothing ever goes wrong. It is that safety has been engineered into the railway, reinforced through training and maintained across generations of employees. Spain's investigations are still unfolding, and no single institutional cause has been proven. But these repeated tragedies demand more than finding the person or component that failed. These repeated accidents reveal something is fundamentally wrong at the first principles level of Spain’s high speed railway system.