Families Search Toledo for 69 Missing in Spain Train Collision

Families searched for missing relatives Thursday in Toledo after two high-speed trains crashed in central Spain on Wednesday, killing at least 69 people.

The collision involved a RENFE train that struck an Iryo train stopped on the tracks, and injured 180 people, including 110 taken to hospitals. Search teams with sniffer dogs continued working Thursday. In Castilla-La Mancha, the region where the collision occurred, more than 2,000 people volunteered to donate blood.

César Vicente, an actor, traveled 495 kilometers (307 miles) from Seville to Toledo looking for his father, who held seat 13A on the RENFE train. Vicente spent Wednesday night with other families at a religious center converted into a base for people affected by the disaster. "I have my father, and I don't know where he is," Vicente said. "I don't want this to happen to anyone. This is unbearable."

Alejandra Marroquín posted on Instagram Wednesday that her sister Adriana, wearing dark blue clothes, had been traveling in car 8 of the RENFE train and that the family could not reach her. "We're still praying, we don't know anything," Marroquín said Thursday morning.

In Urda, a town of about 2,500 people south of Madrid, residents carried unharmed passengers from the tracks to a sports pavilion in their cars and prepared sandwiches. David Gómez, a construction worker, told the newspaper El País that he and others cut through fences to reach the site. "People were trying to get out through the windows .. We cut through some fences to access the area and treated people with the first-aid kits we had brought until emergency services arrived," he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told reporters Thursday morning that the government was working to respond to the victims' families and strengthen security. Emiliano García-Page, president of Castilla-La Mancha, thanked donors and the 1,300 emergency service personnel mobilized after the crash.

This marked Spain's second high-speed rail disaster of 2026; 46 people died in January after one train left the track and struck another in southern Spain. The country's high-speed network, second in size globally after China's, had not seen a fatal crash since entering service more than 30 years ago.