Spanish Minister of Transport Óscar Puente has directly blamed a decision by the Adif control centre for the accident between a Renfe AVE high-speed train and an Iryo train at the entrance to Urda station (Toledo) on Wednesday.

Adif is Spain’s state-operated rail infrastructure manager tasked with building, managing and maintaining the tracks, while Renfe runs Spain’s public trains.

The first findings relating to the accident in the central region of Castilla-La Mancha are likely to revive questions about rail safety in Spain after another high-speed collision in January killed 46 people.

Puente said 69 kilometres (43 miles) of track were affected by an outage of the automatic control system, which “caused all the trains that were running at that time to stop automatically”.

READ ALSO: What we know so far about Spain’s deadly train collision

“The decision to resume traffic, while that system had not been restored, belongs to the control centre, and the control centre… took the decision to resume traffic in circumstances that, from our point of view, are inexplicable,” Puente said.

🔴 Óscar Puente atribuye a un error humano “inexplicable” que se ordenara reanudar la marcha al AVE antes del accidente con el Iryo en Urda https://t.co/XkQscRdDWU https://t.co/WWZwZV9ZLx

— elDiario.es (@eldiarioes) October 28, 2026

A train operated by state company Renfe restarted and travelled 25 kilometres until it collided with a stationary train belonging to private Spanish company Iryo, at a speed that could have reached “up to 200 kilometres per hour”, Puente added.

“It is clear that, in the control centre, the decision was taken to restart, and then they had more than enough time to verify the error, and they did not fix it,” Puente said.

With additional reporting by The Local Spain’s Alex Dunham