A high-speed train derails in Spain rounding a curve with an 80 km/h (50 mph) speed limit at 190 km/h (120 mph), killing 78 passengers.
The Santiago de Compostela derailment occurred on 24 July 2013, when an Alvia high-speed train traveling from Madrid to Ferrol, in the north-west of Spain, derailed at high speed on a bend about 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) outside of the railway station at Santiago de Compostela. Out of 222 people (218 passengers and 4 crew) on board, 143 were injured and 79 died.The train's data recorder showed that it was traveling at about twice the posted speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour (50 mph) when it entered a bend in the rail. The crash was recorded on a track-side camera which shows all thirteen train cars derailing and four overturning. On 28 July 2013, the train's driver, Francisco José Garzón Amo, was charged with 79 counts of homicide by professional recklessness and an undetermined number of counts of causing injury by professional recklessness.The crash was Spain's worst rail accident in forty years, since a crash near El Cuervo, Seville, in 1972.[note 1] The Torre del Bierzo crash in 1944 remains the deadliest.