Sold-out buses and sky-high flight prices: Spain’s train crash leaves passengers stranded

Southern Spain's high-speed train crash on Sunday 18 January left at least 42 people dead and over 150 injured.

With rail services suspended between Madrid and Andalusia following the Adamuz accident, hundreds more passengers were left stranded.

Azucena Esteban and Carlos Hidalgo, a married couple from Madrid who had planned to travel to Seville on a Renfe night train on Sunday, have now managed to reach their destination after a 48-hour journey.

Southern Spain's high-speed train crash on Sunday 18 January left at least 42 people dead and over 150 injured.

With rail services suspended between Madrid and Andalusia following the Adamuz accident, hundreds more passengers were left stranded.

Azucena Esteban and Carlos Hidalgo, a married couple from Madrid who had planned to travel to Seville on a Renfe night train on Sunday, have now managed to reach their destination after a 48-hour journey.

Stranded train passengers faced with astronomical flight prices

"There was no option," Esteban recalls when asked about the transport options they considered at the time. They first spoke to Euronews Travel on the morning of Monday 19 January at Madrid Atocha station, where they were waiting for Renfe to provide a viable travel alternative.

When they realised that even the shuttle bus they had been promised to take them to Méndez Álvaro station would not arrive, they opted to hire a car at Barajas airport, as this service was not available at Atocha.

Flights between Madrid and Seville had climbed to €300, well above their usual price, Azucena recounted the following day by phone and from the Andalusian capital.

"I looked at all the airlines, but Malaga-Madrid was unviable, at least on Monday," explains Alberto García Chaparro, another affected resident in the capital.

"Buses were sold out and rental cars were unviable. Plane fares ranged from €180 to €500. In fact, I tried to buy an Iberia flight for €128, but when I paid [through a flight comparator], it was full and wouldn't let me buy it. When I went back in, it was already worth €300."

Car rental companies hiked prices following train crash

As García Chaparro points out, rental car companies also applied price increases after the accident that blocked all train travel between Madrid and Andalusia, Spain's first and third most populated regions, for 24 hours.

"The cars were at €80 - we looked the day before," says Azucena Esteban, who paid more than €200 to make the journey south. She adds that other users, who had approached the airport with the same intention, received quotes of €1,000 from other car companies.

Due to the system of variable prices depending on supply and demand in these companies, it is impossible to verify this fact: the current figures for a trip similar to the one they took, at the time of writing this article, range between €125 and €250.

Other affected passengers who Euronews Travel spoke with on Monday at Atocha station did manage to purchase bus tickets to Andalusia.

But testimonies gathered during the morning after the accident claimed that there was only one night bus left when consulted: "We were able to catch it at 10pm, but there were no others left." Two women interviewed also testified that air fares were "very expensive".

This is another of those news stories which don't fit neatly into any of the established definitions for the intended content of boards on the Coffee Shop forum - so I'll post it here.

From the BBC:

A sinkhole has been discovered on the section between Parsons Tunnel and Teignmouth with possible voiding. 

You can almost see the thought bubble above his helmet...

'Rescued men still owe hotel bill three weeks later'

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It took volunteers seven hours to bring the two walkers back to safety

A mountain rescue team has issued a plea for two walkers it rescued to send money they promised to pay a hotel that took them in late at night.

Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team said it was called to an "avoidable" seven-hour rescue of two young men on Scafell Pike in the Lake District on 29 December, in "treacherous" conditions.

Once off the mountain, a manager at nearby Wasdale Head Inn offered to provide the walkers with snacks and let them stay in a room with a 35% discount, the team said.

Three weeks later the bill remains unpaid and the two made no contact. Despite the hotel waiving the fee for the team, they said they felt "obliged to reimburse" them to be able to rely on their support in the future.

A spokesman for the Wasdale team said: "We avoid judging those we rescue but struggle to understand when the rescued take advantage of hospitality provided by our supporters in the valley." They added the walkers claimed they had left their money in a tent, which was left near Green Gable when they were rescued, but had agreed to send the £130 later.

The rescue team said: "Disappointingly, in the morning they offered no thanks for the efforts of the hotel, asked for further reductions to the cost, pushed hard for a breakfast and asked if they could arrange transport to get them out of the valley." A phone number they left with the hotel did not work.

The team said the pair also failed to return headtorches lent to them by volunteers when descending the mountain. "We have tried contacting the two walkers to encourage them to settle their debt with the hotel but also to return the head torches," a team spokesman said. "We also would like to return their hospital crutch left in our vehicle that one of them with a previous leg injury had used on the ascent but again, sadly no replies to date."

Well, reopening of the line through Dawlish may have taken a big knock. 

A sinkhole has been discovered on the section between Parsons Tunnel and Teignmouth with possible voiding. 

Oh, and spare a thought for this Network Rail worker:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HASxXofpJ/

The BBC news article has now been updated again.

With my thanks to the BBC, I will quote here a few items:

You can almost see the thought bubble above his helmet:

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"Oh, for flip's sake ... "  [Image from here is not available to guests]

Will it ever reopen?  If this happens more frequently will it just become too expensive to keep open?

3-coach Turbo on a Cotswold Line diagram today. Full and standing after Charlbury and it looked like fitting everyone on at Oxford was going to be entertaining…

I wonder if we'd have been talking about 2014 levels of damage had the resiliance works not been undertaken?

Now "end of the day" on 26/1/26

Great Western Railway (GWR) said the sea wall at Dawlish would be inspected once the storm had passed and services would be suspended until at least 18:00 GMT.

Rail services have also been cancelled between Par and Newquay and Liskeard and Looe due to flooding.

GWR spokesman James Davis said: "There's been a significant amount of debris that the sea has thrown onto the track that will need to be cleared before we can run trains safely.

"The line remains closed and we have a limited bus replacement service operating.

"Clearly, if the same number of people choose to travel as normal you're going to find yourself waiting quite some time."

Tragic chapter on the trains sends rail superpower Spain into crisis

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"Since the high-speed line was built, 30-something years ago, we never had any problems, it worked perfectly and was fantastic," says Alberto Montavez Montes, a shop-owner opposite Córdoba city hall, where the Spanish and Andalusian flags have been hanging at half-mast.

Now, though things feel different: "It's not that there's psychosis, but it does make you just a bit reluctant to get on a train, without a doubt."

In just a few tragic days since two high-speed trains collided in this southern region of Spain, with the loss of 45 lives, it has felt that Spain's much-vaunted rail system has been thrown into a sudden, deep crisis.

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Spaniards observed three days of mourning this week as they reflected on the Adamuz disaster

Second only to China in scale, Spain has 3,900 km (2,400 miles) of high-speed (AVE) rail and until now its national network has been admired for its efficiency and safety.

In 2009, then-US president Barack Obama singled out Spain for praise when he outlined a vision for the creation of a high-speed rail network across America. The line connecting Madrid and Seville "is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined", he said.

At the time a Spanish-led consortium had just begun work on a high-speed link across the Saudi Arabian desert, confirming the country's status as a rail superpower. That reputation has been humbled this week.

Last Sunday, the back three carriages of a train run by private Italian operator Iryo derailed at high speed, along a straight stretch of track, into the path of an oncoming train run by national rail operator Renfe which bore the brunt of the crash.

Two days later, a trainee driver was killed when a wall collapsed on to a suburban rail line near Barcelona in the north-east after heavy rainfall, derailing a train.

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The same day another local train in Catalonia hit a rock, although nobody was injured. And on Thursday, several passengers on a narrow-gauge train suffered minor injuries when a crane struck a carriage.

Train drivers in Catalonia refused to work in the wake of the accident near Barcelona, demanding safety guarantees and contributing to two days without local rail services in the region.

Separately, train drivers' union Semaf has called a nationwide strike for three days in February over what it has described as "the constant deterioration of the rail network".

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A trainee driver was killed when a wall crashed on to his cab in Catalonia in heavy rain

In addition, several high-speed lines have had their speed limits temporarily reduced, due to safety concerns.

Throughout the week, delays, stoppages and other incidents affecting the rail system over recent months have been pored over in the media, while members of the public have aired grievances on social media about uncomfortable or alarming travel experiences.
...

A long delay between the high-speed crash and the rail and rescue services' realisation that two trains – rather than just one – had been involved has created doubts about the emergency response to such tragedies.

The government, the civil guard and an independent commission all continue to investigate the Andalusia crash, although sabotage and human error appear to have been ruled out.

Meanwhile politicians, commentators, and ordinary Spaniards have been debating the possible cause as well as highlighting weaknesses in Spain's overall rail system.

The amount of investment the rail network receives has come under particular scrutiny. The Socialist-led government has sought to dismiss such queries, pointing out, for example, that €700m (£605m) has been invested in updating the Madrid-Andalusia line in recent years, with the stretch of track where the accident took place included in that renovation.

"We're not looking at a problem of lack of maintenance, we're not looking at a problem of obsolete [infrastructure], and we're not looking at a problem of lack of investment," said the transport minister Óscar Puente.

A preliminary report by rail accident investigation commission CIAF has found that grooves found on the wheels of the derailed Iryo train and three earlier trains suggests that a fracture in the track occurred before the Iryo train went over it. Urging caution, Puente said he suspected "a problem that we have never seen on our network before."

Figures released by his ministry show a sharp increase in maintenance spending on the rail system since Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took office in 2018. However, other data tells a different story: Spain was bottom of an index published by German railway association Allianz pro Schiene of spending per capita on rail infrastructure by 14 European countries in 2024.

Salvador García-Ayllón, head of the civil engineering department at Cartagena's University-Polytechnic, described the high-speed network as being "the jewel in the crown of Spanish infrastructure".

However, the liberalisation of the rail sector in 2020, allowing France's Ouigo and Italy's Iryo to provide high-speed services, may have increased competitivity and reduced ticket prices, but it has also put more pressure on the system.

Around 22 million travellers currently use Spain's high-speed trains each year, around double the number prior to the liberalisation, and 17 times the number of users in 1992, the year the Madrid-Seville line was inaugurated.

Salvador García-Ayllón also points to new lines which have been built over recent years – including the north-western region of Galicia and the northern city of Burgos, with a new route along the Mediterranean under construction – whose upkeep presents a challenge. All of this, he said, has left Spanish rail "bursting at the seams".

"The challenge is not just to buy a Ferrari, you have to take the Ferrari to the garage," he said. "You have to invest in maintaining the infrastructure you have."

The high-speed rail system's reliability has dropped noticeably in recent years. In July of 2025, its trains were 19 minutes late on average, according to data provided by Renfe. Local rail has also seen a rise in incidences, such as delays, cancellations and technical problems, which have more than tripled since 2019 on the Madrid local Cercanías network.

Catalonia, which suffered the double accident on Tuesday, has had longstanding and well-documented deficiencies in its suburban Rodalies network, which have fed into its political tensions with Madrid over the last decade.

Perhaps inevitably, the recent tragedies have already spilled into the deeply divided political arena.

Far-right party Vox has said that "travelling in Spain [by train] is no longer safe", a claim that fits into its repeated insistence that the country is akin to a failed state. The main opposition People's Party (PP), meanwhile, has accused the government of hiding information about the high-speed crash.

The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has acknowledged that the accident in southern Spain caused "irreparable" damage. Yet he also insisted that the high-speed network "is the cause of pride for the country". Not so long ago, few Spaniards would have queried that assertion. Now, many will find it hard to agree.

Blimey!  [Image from here is not available to guests] [Image from here is not available to guests]