Railway drivers call for a general strike across the sector

The Spanish Union of Railway Drivers (Semaf) said yesterday, Wednesday, January 21st, that there will be a 48-hour general strike across the sector. This was in response to the incidents in Adamuz (Córdoba) and Gelida (Barcelona), which killed several people, including three train drivers.

The union said in a statement that this protest is one of the first steps that train drivers want to take to fix the problems with the state railway network. He stressed, “We are going to call a general strike across the entire sector to give legal standing and support to the mobilisations of workers and users, in order to demand that the safety and reliability of the network be guaranteed.” There is no date scheduled for the strike yet.

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Semaf has also said that it will hold people in charge of keeping railway infrastructure secure “criminally accountable.”

A train accident in Gelida kills the driver

A Rodalies R4 train went off the tracks on Tuesday night in Gelida (Barcelona), killing one person, seriously injuring five others, and slightly injuring 26 more. It has been revealed that the dead person was one of the train drivers, a 28-year-old man from Seville who was still in training.

The Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police, say that after they found out who the victim was, they told his family about the sad news. There is an investigation going on right now. The train went off the tracks on Tuesday night after a retaining wall fell down, perhaps because of heavy rain.

Oriol Junqueras, the president of ERC, criticised the “lack of investment and neglect of the State” in the Rodalies service on Wednesday. He also called for the service to be moved to Catalonia after all traffic on the network was stopped because of the accident in Gelida. He wrote in a note on X, formerly Twitter, that accidents caused by natural causes can’t be stopped, but the State’s lack of investment and attention in the Rodalies service in Catalonia is what makes the whole service stop today out of fear, mistrust, and the company’s own inability to guarantee the safety of workers and users.

He said that because of this, the transfer of Rodalies is “a national necessity, the only solution on the table” to make the infrastructure better and a service that he thinks is very important to the lives of Catalans.

Author: Derek Appleton