The Minister of Development and Mobility of the Junta de Andalucía, Mario Muñoz-Atanet, on Thursday called on the central Government to "triple" the budgetary effort allocated to the maintenance of the Madrid-Seville high-speed line. As he warned, the allocation for this item has been reduced by "26%" between 2019 and 2024 in relative terms.
Muñoz-Atanet made these remarks on the program 'Espejo Público' on Antena 3 Televisión, in statements collected by Europa Press, following the accident between two trains on the Madrid-Seville connection that occurred this Wednesday in Urda (Toledo), in which at least 68 people have died.
The Andalusian Minister of Development has underlined that "the Andalusian, and Spanish, railway system" as a whole "has been pioneering" and has stood out for offering "a magnificent service". For this reason, he lamented that what is being "experienced today is a situation that does not correspond to the infrastructure we deserve and that we have had in the past".
In this context, the minister has insisted that "what needs to be done is an important reinforcement in maintenance", since the Madrid-Seville AVE line currently supports "three times more services than usual" from previous stages, while "investment in maintenance has not grown threefold".
"When you have an infrastructure through which three times more services pass, you have to triple the investment effort," Muñoz-Atanet stressed. He explained that he had already conveyed this concern to the competent Secretary of State during a sectoral conference in Madrid, after the Junta analyzed that "investment in maintenance from 2019 to 2024 has fallen by 26%".
The minister specified that those are the data available to the regional administration for those fiscal years, because the railway infrastructure administrator, Adif, is "very opaque in its information", and the documentation they have managed to collect confirms that "there has been a reduction of 26% in investment in maintenance".
Muñoz-Atanet has qualified that, "in absolute terms, investment and maintenance have grown", but has insisted that the analysis must be done "in relative terms, because the variable you have to work with is the train-kilometer". In this sense, he has recalled that "now there are many more trains and more AVE kilometers", and that "if you do the division, you realize that there is a maintenance investment 26% lower than that of 2019", when there were no "additional services" that operate currently and not only Renfe operated on that line.
"Sum of situations" in the accident
Regarding Wednesday's accident, the councilor has pointed out that it is "a sum of situations that have occurred in a concatenated way", and has emphasized that "rail services are very robust systems, and they have safety systems that are redundant".
According to what he explained, "for a situation of this type to occur, many things had to fail beforehand, in a concatenated way. And what cannot be is that in the end what is being looked at is the human failure of the one who was in the control center", who "should not regularly and frequently take the reins in the use of trains".
The Andalusian Minister of Development has added that "rail safety systems are automatic", but "what we are seeing, unfortunately, is that too often the control center has to take the reins", so that "what should be an exception is becoming a norm".
"Faced with these situations, failures can occur, but I would rather think about how many lives these gentlemen from the control center have saved thanks to their permanent intervention", the Minister of Development concluded.