It was approaching 08:30 (07:30 GMT) on a normal Wednesday. Two high-speed trains were travelling south from the Spanish capital, Madrid, to Seville.
One, run by state-owned operator Renfe had 397 passengers on board. Ahead of it on the same line was a train of Iryo private operator with 147 passengers. A reported issue with the automatic signalling system – a computer failure – had forced all trains to halt on the affected stretch.
Then the impossible happened, Spain’s transport minister said, as the Renfe train was ordered to proceed in “error”.
It crashed into the back of the other train between municipalities Mora and Orgaz, about 140km (87 miles) south of Madrid.
Broken arms, broken noses, rail through the roof
Some of the passengers were asleep, some had already started their working day on laptops – and others scrolled through their apps on their phones.
The journey was interrupted with an announcement that there was congestion on the tracks. This lasted a few minutes – for some, a bit longer for others.
Tangui Binier, 22, was in the Iryo train, the front carriage, number eight. His father was in number seven.
Their train was one of six to have been ordered to stop at 08:30. A few minutes later, “the train started speeding”, Binier told the BBC, “then it came to a sudden halt”.
Baffled, he looked out of the window and saw “wires on the left side come down, and then there being just a lot of smoke behind us.”
Spanish journalist Roberto Gómez was dozing on the high-speed Renfe train which had stopped more than 25km (16 miles) away from Binier’s.
It was a brief stop. A few minutes later, the train began to move again, he explained, and then the crash happened.
He did not know that at 08:36 his train had been ordered to proceed with the journey and some 17 minutes later the “truly unbelievable” happened, Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said.
“The impact was terrible,” Gómez told Onda Cero radio. “You can imagine, the carriage is completely destroyed. All the suitcases are all over the wrecked carriage.”
Gómez suffered only minor injuries but described another passenger falling on top of him and sustaining a deep gash on his head.
“We were able to help people who had suffered severe blows to their chest and ribs,” he said.
Rafael Barcelo was in one of the worst-affected carriages. A bruise on his forehead makes him one of the lucky survivors. He was having a coffee at the time of the crash and “felt a huge impact”.
“We were all thrown into the air,” he told Reuters news agency at the site of the crash.
“I am reasonably OK, my friend is quite worse.”
“I was travelling in coach seven, which is the one with more victims and the one most destroyed. I at least counted eight victims in that coach,” he said, visibly shocked.
ReutersEven in the carriages farthest away from the impact on the Renfe train “everything was completely destroyed – the seats were detached, and most of the people who were travelling facing the same direction as the train were thrown into the air”, according to Salvador Arriza.
“It was something brutal,” he said, describing how some people “were trapped between the seats”.
Once out, he saw how bad the situation was.
“What caught my attention is that in one of the coaches there was a piece of train track that went through the roof of the coach, and I think that might have helped to stop or reduce the inertia of the train.”
EPASebastián Herrero was travelling in the train which was hit from the rear and the “terrible, terrible impact” threw him on to the seats in front.
“After we fell, there were many people with broken noses, broken arms… We started seeing smoke everywhere.”
EPAHow could this happen?
Once the initial impact was over, passengers in Binier’s carriage debated whether it was safe to leave because of the electrical wires strewn outside the train.
Some were worried about the risk of another train colliding and decided to exit.
“We did not know what had happened until we took a step outside, and there there was evidence of what had happened.
“We saw the other train behind ours and we saw our train completely flipped over and the back side full of debris,” he told the BBC.
“When I got out of the train I was in complete shock, complete awe. There were people in danger, it was very hard to see, there was dead bodies, there was missing limbs. “
“I don’t know if that is something I will ever recover from.”
But the adrenaline kicked in, he said, and those like him who had not suffered any injuries went to help.
Among them was his dad, who he explained was “able to carry a girl to safety, with a broken hip”.
It was not long before local people arrived, followed by the police and ambulance services of the Guardia Civil.
“I’m really one of the most fortunate people and the luckiest person. I feel like just I’m so fortunate and I see other people who are not so fortunate, and I see them very close up. Sometimes you just ask yourself ‘Why me?’,” he said.
Spain was already reeling from the Adamuz high-speed rail disaster outside Córdoba in January, in which 46 people died.
It happened on the same high-speed rail line, but much further south. So Wednesday’s accident has raised many questions for the authorities.
Affected passengers were visibly angry.
“It isn’t possible that our train was stopped for five or 10 minutes and that the other train wasn’t told to stop,” one of them said.
“How can this happen with the technology we have?,” they added. “It’s not normal. We weren’t told anything. The person who should have been told something was the driver of the other train. We wouldn’t have cared as long as the other train had been warned. I don’t understand this.”
