Two fatal train accidents in Spain in the last 48 hours are raising many questions about train safety. The exact causes of the two accidents, which have different characteristics, are still unknown.
The one in Adamuz, Cordoba, is a double "strange" derailment that has caused the death of 43 people. The one in Gelida, Barcelona, occurred after the collapse of a retaining wall in the middle of the storm that hit Catalonia.
Apart from the causes of the accidents, RTVE Noticias collects some questions and answers about how train safety works:
How safe is the train compared to other modes of transport?
The train is considered one of the safest means of transport, second only to planes and buses.
Researcher Ian Savage, from Northwestern University's Department of Economics and Transportation, analysed US transportation fatality data from 2000 to 2009 in 2013. His study concludes that car fatalities reach a rate of 7.28 deaths per billion miles travelled, while commuter and national rail fatalities fall to 0.43 deaths.
In his article, as in other publications, the lowest fatality rates are for bus (0.11) and commercial aircraft (0.07), and the highest for motorbikes (212.57). "Motorway crashes account for the vast majority (95%) of the total risk of transport fatalities," Savage points out.
Another more recent study focusing on European railways shows that the number of fatal collisions and derailments has fallen at a rate of around 5.6% per year between 1990 and 2019. The estimated accident rate in 2019 was 0.85 fatal collisions or derailments per billion train kilometres, according to article by statistician Andrew Evans, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London.
This analysis highlights the 78% decrease in the risk of fatal accidents since 1990 and shows that on average in Europe there are 3.89 fatal train accidents per year, according to 2019 data.
With regard to the number of fatalities, Evans points to their "asymmetrical distribution", with most accidents causing a low number of fatalities, but some having a high number of fatalities.
And in Spain?
The latest report of the State Railway Safety Agency corresponds to 2024 and shows a "notable" reduction in the number of significant accidents at a time of "slight increase in overall rail traffic". However, it also recognises an upward trend from 2020.
According to this document, the rate of significant accidents per million train kilometres was 0.27 in 2024, a lower value than in previous years. "It will be necessary to confirm in subsequent years whether 2024 has definitively broken the upward trend that was evident in recent years, with increasing moving averages, and whether the rates prior to 2020 are recovered," the report states.
For serious accidents (if there is one fatality, five serious injuries or major damage), the rate has remained at 0.09 per million kilometres in 2023 and 2024. In the last decade, the value has fluctuated in a range between 0.08, which was recorded in 2021, and 0.13, the peak reached in 2017.
The Spanish railway system, according to experts consulted by RTVE, is "good and above the average" of European countries. Moreover, they point out that, despite the increase of incidents - "evident and significant"- the figures in our country are below those of the big countries of the European Union, as our colleague Juanma Hernández explained in this article in this article.
The National Statistics Institute (INE) publishes the annual number of serious injuries and deaths in railway accidents since 2010. The average for the last decade (between 2015 and 2024) is 21 deaths per year, in a statistic that also includes accidents caused by carelessness, suicides or carelessness of citizens, among other issues. The peak of the curve corresponds to 2013, when the Alvia train accident occurred in Angrois, near Santiago de Compostela (Galicia).
Why don't we wear belts?
One of the recurring questions in recent days is why we don't wear seat belts when travelling by train, when they are compulsory in cars and planes. The reason is simple: it would be more unsafe to wear them.
This is the conclusion of, among other bodies and research, the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) in the UK, after carrying out tests on dummies and computer models of both two-anchor belts (such as those in aeroplanes) and three-anchor belts (such as those in cars). Their results showed that belts would increase passenger injuries in the event of a crash, compared to the use of impact-resistant seats designed to deform.
"Trains do not carry seat belts because international regulations advise against it", the official Renfe account responds to users who have asked about this issue in the past.
Passive safety in trains, i.e. how the passenger is protected when an incident occurs, involves issues such as the separation of interior elements (seats, tables) or the way in which they are designed to absorb and distribute the energy of an impact, bearing in mind that the carriages that make up the train do not brake at the same speed as a car or suffer abrupt vertical falls as happens with turbulence in an aeroplane.
How does the train security system work?
The "railway dictionary" of railway operator Adif collects some elements that help to better understand how the train safety system works. This includes signalling, the state of the infrastructure or of the different parts of the convoy, but also the situation of the driver.
Source: A European Perspective, RTVE
Originally published by Sofía Soler on 22 January 2026 07:06 GMT+1