Spain’s rail network is under scrutiny after a commuter train crashed near Barcelona just days after at least 43 people died and 152 were injured in a collision between two high-speed trains.
The second crash in as many days occurred at approximately 9pm on Tuesday when a retaining wall collapsed on to the track near Gelida in the region of Catalonia in north-east Spain, derailing a local train.
A trainee driver, named as 27-year-old Fernando Huerta from Seville, was killed and 41 people were injured, five of whom are in a critical condition.
It is believed the wall collapsed as a result of the unusually heavy rainfall that Catalonia is experiencing. However, as a precaution the region’s network was shut down pending inspections, stranding hundreds of thousands of people and causing chaos on the roads.
An average day in 2024, 54 people in the EU died in road accidents, per Eurostat.
Edit:
Somewhere around 40 people a day die in road accidents in the EU. (Eurostat seems to only have numbers with the actual number of dead for 2023 so far and that year I think it was something like 47 per day on average, but other sources show road deaths decreased somewhat in 2024.