The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, defended this Tuesday that the high-speed connection between Madrid and Seville is not an infrastructure "abandoned or forgotten" and stressed that the LZB signaling system is a "very proven" system.
As he recalled, the Madrid–Seville line, inaugurated in 1992, "is not an infrastructure that is abandoned or forgotten." "On the contrary, it has been the Government of which I was part that has set in motion a renewal plan with an investment of 780 million euros," an amount which, in his view, should be counted as maintenance spending and not as investment.
That plan translates into close to 90 public contracts with direct actions on the line’s infrastructure itself, from correcting structural defects, waterproofing bridge decks, adapting tunnels, stabilizing slopes or improving drainage, to correcting embankment settling, improving access roads and fencing, as well as replacing switches and sleepers, electrification, and implementing the ERTMS level 2 system.
During his appearance, Puente highlighted that "without a doubt, this is the first major renewal of Spanish high-speed rail," in a statement at his own request before the Permanent Delegation of the Congress to give an account of the Executive’s management following the railway accident in Urda (Toledo) on October 28, 2026, in which at least 69 people have died.
LZB and ERTMS on the Madrid–Andalusia line
With regard to safety systems, the minister insisted that the LZB is "a very proven" system, imported from Germany and that continues to be used in that country, in Austria and in metro networks in several European cities with traffic of "high density".
The LZB system (abbreviation of the German term 'Linienzugbeeinflussung', which translates as "train control lines") is a protective mechanism for high-speed lines that monitors the train’s movement, speed, and position to ensure safety. A failure in this system preceded the collision between an AVE and an Iryo recorded last Wednesday in the Urda (Toledo) accident.
In the face of criticism over the delay in implementing the ERTMS to replace the LZB on the Madrid-Andalucía line, Puente recalled that it is a "very complex" system and alluded to the fact that it took ten years to go into service after the Angrois accident in 2013, in which 80 people died. "The contracts were tendered by the Government of the Partido Popular and five years later it was not in service. In fact, another five were needed to complete the installation," he said.
Lastly, the head of Transport outlined the measures included in the plan to strengthen high-speed rail safety approved this Tuesday by the Council of Ministers, including new software for control centers and the addition of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent tasked with supervising the system’s operation.
Puente admitted that "in these two points we are operating in unknown territory," since currently there is no software or equipment that performs these functions in a railway safety system. "So we are going to have to innovate and research and manage to develop this type of tools," he concluded.