Two deaths and 274 injured on local rail service since 2010

The two accidents that have taken place in less than three months on the R4 Rodalies commuter line, both with one fatal victim and numerous people injured, have shown up the serious deficiencies on the Renfe rail system.

Even though the state authorities passed jurisdiction for the service to the Catalan government in 2010, the running effectively remains in the hands of the Spanish development ministry, which has continually blocked spending plans to modernise it. Since the Catalan government took over, the number of incidents has continued to rise. A report last year by the CCOO union put the figure at more than 300 minor incidents a month.

Yet, beyond the mounting number of everyday incidents, the Rodalies service has experienced a score of accidents in the past nine years, including collisions and derailments, causing a total of two deaths with 274 people injured, some 20 of them seriously.

Among the accidents registered since 2010, one of the most serious took place in Barcelona’s França station in 2017, when a train failed to stop early enough and went crashing into the buffers, leaving seven seriously injured and 52 others with minor injuries. In this case, as with a number of the other accidents, investigators point to the poor state of the service’s facilities and infrastructure.