The train is moving normally, on one of those journeys where nothing seems out of the ordinary and passengers spend the time reading, listening to music, or looking at their phones. Suddenly, without warning, the lights go out, and they begin to feel very violent vibrations, even feeling their carriage jumping on the tracks. Then screams are heard, chaos spreads, and the tragedy takes the lives of more than 40 people.
Adamuz, Córdoba. January 2026. A train derails and collides with another train running on the opposite track. Every time a tragedy like Adamuz happens, our rulers fill the news with minutes of silence, solemn statements, and the idea that it was an accident. Something unpredictable, and an exceptional failure within a system that, essentially, works.
That narrative is comforting, but false. Not because there are no specific technical failures, but because the isolated error is used to hide the real problem. Adamuz is not an isolated misfortune. It is the logical result of a management model that dilutes responsibility, wastes resources, and punishes silent prevention in favor of politically profitable spending.
The scene feels familiar because it is not new. The Ascensor da Glória funicular in Lisbon suffered a cable break; in Italy, the Stresa–Mottarone accident in May 2021; and many other examples that could be recalled today. When several developed countries link similar tragedies in critical infrastructure, we are not facing bad luck. We are facing poorly designed incentives that operate for decades and only become visible when it is already too late.
Public management of infrastructure suffers from a structural problem that is rarely mentioned. It does not respond to signals of profit and loss. It does not go bankrupt. It does not disappear. It does not assume proportional consequences when it fails. The human and economic cost of an accident is socialized, while the decision that made it possible is diluted among agencies, committees, and officials who rarely pay a real price.
In the private sector, exactly the opposite happens. A company that manages safety poorly not only faces legal sanctions, but something much more lethal; the loss of trust. A single serious accident can destroy an entire company. That is why, in sectors such as aviation, real safety standards are far above legal minimums. Not out of altruism, but because survival requires anticipating risk. Airlines do not operate at the limit of regulation, but instead introduce redundancies, conservative limits, and protocols that make the process more expensive but reduce the probability of disaster. The incentive is that a failure is not a political problem, it is an economic sentence that, in many cases, between compensation and repair costs, would lead the airline to bankruptcy.
In public management, that incentive does not exist. The manager does not lose his company, does not respond with his own assets, and rarely sees his career seriously damaged. The system rewards other things, such as growing budgets, larger staff, higher salaries, and visible projects that can be inaugurated. Maintenance, prevention, and silent investment compete at a disadvantage against spending that can be sold electorally.
High-speed trains in Spain are among the fastest in the world, because that news is very striking and attracts many votes; however, at the same time, the money spent on increasing train speed is not spent on their maintenance. For years, signs appear such as trains stopped in tunnels, recurring breakdowns, delays, small incidents that become anecdotes and disappear from the media agenda after a few days. None of this generates a deep review of the system because there is no mechanism that forces a reaction. There are no clear losses, no prices that warn that capital is being consumed faster than expected, and no unequivocal signal that real amortization is not being covered. The serious accident then fulfills the same function that catastrophes fulfilled in planned economies. It is a brutal and late indicator that something had been failing for a long time. Not because the accident is the cause of the problem, but because it is the only language that a system without prices understands.
This is aggravated in the case of technologically complex and extremely costly infrastructure, such as high-speed rail. Spain has committed to one of the most extensive networks in the world, with very high construction, maintenance, and renewal costs. However, many of these lines are not profitable even in operational terms. As there is no real economic calculation, the lines that perform better subsidize those that perform worse, preventing maintenance from being allocated where wear and usage are greatest.
When the criterion is political and not economic, all lines must be maintained “equally”, even if they do not suffer the same level of stress or transport the same volume of passengers. The result is that relevant information is diluted. It is not known precisely where more spending is needed, when renewal should come earlier, or which infrastructure should be reconsidered or even closed. Inaugurating new lines generates headlines, photos, and votes. Maintaining, renewing, or replacing existing infrastructure generates no visible political return. The cost is high, the benefit is invisible, and the risk of not doing it does not materialize within an electoral cycle. Thus, investment in maintenance tends to be postponed, amortization is stretched, and there is confidence that nothing serious will happen today.
Adamuz is not the consequence of a badly tightened bolt. It is the consequence of decades in which maintenance competes with politically untouchable priorities, in which no one wins elections by avoiding an accident that has not yet happened, and in which the cost of making bad decisions does not fall on those who make them.
This is not a technical criticism, but an institutional one. As long as safety depends on structures that do not go bankrupt, that do not compete, and that do not assume real losses, incentives will continue to push in the wrong direction. Not toward prevention, but toward postponement; not toward efficiency, but toward appearance.
The tragedy of Adamuz is not a failure of the system. It is the natural conclusion of a system working exactly as it was designed, ready to fail at the most unexpected moment but assurdedly one where no one can or will take responsibility. And as long as what is a consequence, continues to be called an accident, it will happen again. The only solution is to privatise the railway line, both in Spain and in all countries of the world.
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