The railway tragedy in Spain: 17 minutes during which no one noticed anything / The death toll has reached 68

At least 68 people died on Wednesday following the collision between two Spanish high-speed trains, while rescue teams search through the wreckage for other victims, following this second fatal railway accident in Spain this year, the most serious in Europe since 2013.

Yet no one can find a reasonable explanation for this recent tragedy, writes “El Pais”, which reconstructed the 17 minutes during which no one at the control center noticed that the AVE train was heading toward a violent collision with the Iryo train.

For now, this is one of the major unanswered questions left by the accident involving the two trains, which claimed at least 68 lives: how is it possible that neither the locomotive driver nor his supervisors noticed, for 17 minutes—the time it took the AVE train to cover the 25 kilometers separating it from the stopped Iryo train—that a train carrying 397 passengers was heading at full speed toward a violent collision with another stopped train carrying 147 other passengers?