For ten days in January 2026, Catalonia’s commuter rail network, Rodalies, was in chaos. Thousands of passengers faced cancellations, delays and closed lines, and many asked the same question: how could everything go wrong at once?
The trigger
On 20 January, after exceptionally heavy rain, a retaining wall next to the AP-7 motorway near Gelida, in Barcelona province, collapsed onto a train on the R4 line. A trainee driver was killed and dozens of passengers were injured.
The accident came just days after the deadly high-speed derailment at Adamuz, in Córdoba, which had already shaken confidence in Spain’s railways.
A network under strain
After the Gelida accident, inspections across the network found numerous defects requiring urgent repair, and many sections were placed under speed restrictions. Lines were closed or partially suspended, and train drivers, concerned about safety, refused to work on some routes until they were checked.
The authorities announced a return to normal service several times, only for new problems to emerge, deepening passengers’ frustration.
The root causes
While the immediate trigger was extreme weather, many experts and passenger groups point to deeper causes:
- Years of under-investment in maintenance on the Rodalies network, which carries hundreds of thousands of passengers a day.
- Ageing infrastructure, much of it designed for very different climate conditions.
- Divided responsibilities between the state rail infrastructure company Adif, operator Renfe and the Catalan government, which complicates coordination.
- Poor communication with passengers during the crisis.
Climate pressure
Engineers warn that more intense rainfall is placing new demands on embankments, walls and tunnels built for historical weather patterns. Adapting infrastructure to climate change requires constant monitoring and preventive maintenance, rather than repairs after damage occurs.
What happens next
The crisis led to changes at the top of Adif and Rodalies and renewed commitments to invest in the network, with more funding earmarked for maintenance. Passenger groups say that the test will be whether that investment is sustained over time.
A wider lesson
The Rodalies crisis is a reminder that infrastructure that is not maintained eventually fails, often at the worst possible moment. For passengers, the message from the crisis was not that they had been unlucky, but that problems which had been building for years had finally become impossible to ignore.
