Investigators blame speeding for subway crash

A subway train that derailed and killed 41 people in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia had been travelling at twice the normal speed, a government official said today.

The city, meanwhile, suddenly turned from preparing a festive visit of the pope to mourning its dead from Spain’s worst ever subway accident.

The excessive speed leads officials to think the driver had either fainted or become otherwise indisposed prior to yesterday’s accident, Valencia’s regional transport minister Jose Ramon Garcia Anton said.

The train was doing 50mph rather than the average of 25mph at the curved section where the train derailed, he said.

Garcia Anton said neither the train nor tracks had suffered mechanical failure before the derailment in Spain’s third largest city, denying initial reports that a wheel on the train had broken.

He said the driver, who died in the accident, was fully qualified and been on the job since April after undergoing more than 250 hours of training.

The driver had first worked as a subway inspector and ticket agent.

“There was an excess of speed at some point,” the minister said in the first government news conference about the accident.

Garcia Anton spoke hours after Valencia and other Spanish cities observed five minutes of silence in memory of the victims. Another 47 people were injured.

Pope Benedict XVI, who arrives in Valencia on Saturday for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Meeting of the Families, prayed for the victims.

The city had been festooned with posters advertising the visit, and flags with the yellow and white colours of the Vatican hung from many balconies.

Hundreds of thousands of people were travelling to this Mediterranean city for the meeting, but organisers called off all festive celebrations that had been planned for the Pope’s visit.

An evening funeral Mass was planned and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who cut short a visit to India to return to Spain, and King Juan Carlos were due to attend.

A plaza outside the headquarters of the Valencia regional government swelled with hundreds of people for the noontime vigil.

“Spaniards’ hearts are in Valencia,” Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, a Valencia native, said afterward.

Politicians and workers at the Spanish parliament in Madrid stepped outside to join an act of remembrance, as did people at Zapatero’s office complex in the Spanish capital.

A bouquet of red and white carnations lay outside the Jesus station where the accident occurred, and several candles burned.

Traffic came to a halt along streets lining the plaza, and construction workers on balconies overlooking it paused to take part.

Relatives gathered at a morgue to claim the bodies of their loved ones.

“I have lost my niece Laura,” said Jose Lopez, 68. “She never took the metro, she always used her car. But she had some paperwork to do and she must have thought that it was better to go by metro. And look how it turned out.”

Lopez said the family learned of his niece’s fate last night, hours after the accident. He said she had been missing for most of the day but “we never suspected that she was even in the accident.”

“The family is destroyed. You can only imagine,” he said.

Authorities ruled out terrorism as the cause, but the accident brought back memories of the 2004 bombings of Madrid commuter trains that killed 191 people.

Rescue workers hustled bloodied, sooty survivors from the tunnel.

The accident occurred shortly after 1pm yesterday as many people packed subway trains to head home for lunch.

It was the second accident on Valencia’s No 1 line in less than a year.

A September collision involving three trains injured at least 30 people, four of them seriously.