Months before the Adamuz accident, Adif maintenance chief Raúl Míguez asked president Luis Pedro Marco de la Peña to double the high-speed maintenance budget, according to ABC. The Adamuz collision occurred in Córdoba on January 18, 2026, involving trains operated by Renfe and Iryo on the Madrid-Andalusia corridor. Reuters reported that 46 people were killed and more than 150 injured; investigators examined the possibility of a rail break at a weld.
Four sources at Adif told the newspaper that De la Peña rejected the full increase and agreed to around €500m, roughly half the requested amount. ABC says the figure was already a slight rise on the amount recorded at the time. The sources put high-speed maintenance spending in 2025 at €438m.
That figure is separate from the conventional network. In 2025 it received €685m, bringing the two networks' combined total to €1.123bn. The previous year, high-speed maintenance stood at €425m and conventional rail at €637m, for a combined €1.062bn.
For 2023, ABC's figures show €375m for high-speed lines and €625m for the conventional network. The newspaper gives the combined total as €999m.
Adif's response cited €1.375bn in maintenance spending for 2026 and said the total had risen from €703m in 2018. The figure combines high-speed and conventional rail, while ABC's report concerned the high-speed lines affected by recent fatal accidents. Spain has roughly 4,000 km of high-speed lines, the longest network in Europe. European Commission data cited by Reuters put average annual investment in the high-speed network at about €1.5bn between 2018 and 2022, with around 16% allocated to maintenance and upgrades, including renewals.
The 2025 figures were part of an agreement covering 2020-2025 between former Adif president Isabel Pardo de Vera and the Transport Ministry. The sources consulted by ABC questioned whether the investment targets set out in that agreement had been met. Spain’s railway safety authority recorded 45 railway accidents in 2016 and 57 in 2024; the 2025 count was 69, Reuters reported. In a separate rail-crash episode, RUSSPAIN reported that Sánchez urged Puente to stay in office after the Urda crash.
The Urda collision took place near Urda, in Toledo, on October 28, 2026, on the Madrid-Córdoba high-speed line. Railway Gazette reported that at least 68 people were killed. Its preliminary timeline described an outage affecting the LZB train-protection equipment at about 08:30, followed by authorization for a Renfe train to resume movement at 08:36 while an Iryo train remained stationary ahead; the collision occurred at about 08:53. Reuters later reported that a preliminary report put the moving train’s speed at at least 160 km/h when it struck the stationary train. Investigations into the Urda and Adamuz crashes remained ongoing.
