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  • 2 weeks ago
Experts on Monday (January 19) studying the cause of the derailment of a high-speed train in Spain - which killed dozens of people - found a broken joint on the rails, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. Earlier, the Spanish transport minister said the crash on Sunday night was "extremely strange" as a train derailed on a straight stretch of the track, ahead of colliding with another train. - REUTERS

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00:00Police footage taken on Monday shows the sheer scale of a high-speed train derailment and
00:05crash with an oncoming train.
00:07Dozens of people were killed and over 100 injured on Sunday, making it one of the worst
00:12railway accidents in Europe in 80 years.
00:15Experts probing the cause of the accident found a broken joint on the rails, according
00:19to a source briefed on initial investigations into the disaster.
00:23Technicians on site analysing the rails identified some wear on the joint between sections of
00:27the rail, known as a fish plate, which they said showed the fault had been there for
00:31some time, the source said.
00:33They found that the faulty joint created a gap between the rail sections that widened as
00:37trains continued to travel on the track.
00:40Earlier Spain's Transport Minister Oscar Puente said a derailment on a well-maintained stretch
00:44of track was tremendously strange and had confounded experts.
00:50Ana survived the crash along with her sister.
00:54Some people were fine and others were really bad.
00:57And we had them in front of us and you could see them dying and you could do nothing.
01:03I was on this side and I started to go up and I thought it wasn't normal.
01:07I travel a lot by train.
01:08That's where I looked at my sister.
01:10I looked for her and it's the last moment I remember before it all went dark.
01:13Suddenly, I only heard yelling.
01:15Spain's President Álvaro Fernández Heredia said on local radio that the collision happened
01:21about 20 seconds after the derailment, so there was no time to activate an emergency
01:26brake and that human error is practically ruled out, while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez
01:32vowed absolute transparency in the train crash investigation.
01:36Ministers, officials and locals paid tribute to those killed and injured with a minute of
01:42silence.
01:45Problems with infrastructure on that stretch of track, from signalling failures to issues
01:49with overhead power lines, have caused delays to high-speed trains ten times since 2022.
01:55That's according to a Reuters review of state-owned rail infrastructure administrator Adif's X account.
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