Only the decision of an Adif employee prevented the tragedy this Saturday in the Atocha railway tunnel. This was confirmed this Tuesday by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puentewhich reveals that the injured convoy was taken off the road on purpose to avoid a major accident. “A worker at the Adif control center made the decision to divert it to cause its derailmentpreventing it from ending up on the Atocha railway beach or, eventually, colliding with an oncoming train,” he told reporters.
“If they don’t derail it with the switch change, it would go straight into an Iryo that was full of passengers and that was stopped waiting for the maneuver to end,” CGT union sources say. 20 minutes, information that Puente did not want to confirm. “It was a heroic act by Adif’s colleagues because they saved many lives. An accident in a tunnel is a mousetrap because if fire enters or there is an explosion as a result of the collision, no one comes out alive.”
How did the incident unfold? In an audio broadcast this Monday in some media and that has gone viral on social networks, an alleged railway worker assures that the train that derailed “the entire tunnel was adrift” between ChamartÃn and Atocha and “it passed at 100 or 200 km/h through the needles of the Botanical Garden (place where it was derailed),” a point at which the maximum speed allowed is 50 km/h.
The CGT union sources assure this medium that a “cluster of absurdities” occurred, starting because the train that derailed was carrying out a maneuver “wrongly”: “A train without brakes has to go in a sandwich, with one car in front and another behind with traction and brake, That’s something we railroad workers know.”
When the control center realizes that there is a convoy traveling at high speed in the direction of Atocha and that it could collide with another, The Adif employee makes the decision to derail it at the intersection of needles on the curve of the Botanical Garden. “Technically, what they did was put the needle on detour to take the train off the track. They put the needle in a way that should never be put, but they did it so that the train would derail, although in this case it ended up overturning because it must have been carrying a lot of strength,” explains the CGT coordinator.
