Santiago de Compostela — An Express at 180 on an 80 km/h Curve

On 24 July 2013, at about 20:41 local time, a Renfe Alvia express on the Madrid–Ferrol service derailed on the A Grandeira curve at Angrois, roughly four kilometres short of Santiago de Compostela station in Galicia, north-western Spain. The train entered the 80 km/h curve at about 180 km/h; all thirteen vehicles left the rails and several overturned, and 79 people were killed and some 140 injured. It is the deadliest rail accident in modern Spanish history. (The toll was briefly reported as 80 because of a misidentification of remains; the confirmed figure is 79.)

The train was an Alvia Class 730, a variable-gauge set able to run on both high-speed and conventional lines. For most of the route from Madrid it had run on high-speed track equipped with the European train-control system ERTMS/ETCS, which can automatically enforce speed limits. As the line approached Santiago it transitioned to conventional track fitted with the older ASFA system, which warns the driver of restrictions but cannot itself slow or stop an overspeeding train. The A Grandeira curve sat just past that transition, where a long stretch of 200 km/h running gave way abruptly to an 80 km/h limit — and where the responsibility for braking in time rested entirely on the driver. In the moments before the curve, the driver, Francisco José Garzón Amo, was on the train’s telephone with a Renfe controller discussing the route ahead and consulting a document; he braked late and hard, but the train was still doing about 179 km/h when it derailed.

The official investigation was conducted by the Comisión de Investigación de Accidentes Ferroviarios (CIAF), the rail accident investigation commission within Spain’s Ministry of Public Works (Ministerio de Fomento). Its report attributed the accident to human error — the driver’s failure to reduce speed for the curve, distracted by the phone call and his loss of position — and treated this as the only contributing cause. That conclusion drew sustained criticism. In 2016 the European Commission asked the European Union Agency for Railways (the ERA, successor to the European Railway Agency) to review the inquiry; the agency questioned CIAF’s independence — the team had included staff from the infrastructure manager ADIF, the operator Renfe, and the consultancy Ineco — and faulted the report for emphasising the single human error while underweighting the systemic and signalling factors: the absence of automatic train protection at the curve, the abrupt speed transition, and the unaddressed derailment risk that contractors had earlier flagged.

The criminal proceedings reflected that wider picture. After a trial that began in 2022, a court in 2024 convicted both the driver and a senior ADIF safety official, finding that the failure to assess and mitigate the curve’s risk, as well as the driver’s conduct, contributed to the deaths.