Second fatal train crash shocks Spain as death toll in the first collision rises to 43

GELIDA, Spain (AP) — Commuter rail service in Spain's northeastern Catalonia region was suspended Wednesday after a Barcelona commuter train crashed the night before, killing one person and injuring 37 others, authorities said.

The crash came two days after Spain’s worst railway disaster since 2013, which left many Spaniards in disbelief. The death toll in that crash, in southern Spain, rose to 43.

The commuter train on Tuesday night hit a retaining wall that fell onto the tracks near the Catalan town of Gelida, about 37 kilometers (23 miles) outside Barcelona, officials said.

“It's very strange, all of this. It doesn't make sense,” said Antonella Miranda, a barista in Madrid. “Let's see what explanations they provide after the second one.”

The man who died from Tuesday's crash was a conductor in training, regional authorities said. Most of the injured rode in the first train carriage.

Rail disruptions on Wednesday caused significant traffic jams on roads leading into Barcelona. Catalonia's regional authorities asked people to reduce unnecessary travel and companies to allow remote work until service was resumed.

“This is very bad. If (the infrastructure) was already faulty and there were complaints, they should have done something earlier," Dolores Sogas said in a commuter town where hundreds of people were delayed or stranded on Wednesday.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez offered his condolences on X, writing: “All my affection and solidarity with the victims and their families.”

While Spain’s high-speed rail network generally runs smoothly, and at least until Sunday had been a source of confidence, commuter rail networks are plagued by reliability issues. However, crashes causing injury or death aren't common.

Spain’s railway operator Adif said the containment wall likely collapsed because of heavy rainfall that swept across the northeastern Spanish region this week.

Sunday evening's crash happened when the tail end of a train carrying 289 passengers on the route from Malaga to the capital, Madrid, derailed and crashed into an incoming train traveling from Madrid to Huelva, another southern city, according to Adif. The collision took place near Adamuz, a town about 370 kilometers (roughly 230 miles) from Madrid.

The front of the second train, which was carrying 184 people, took the brunt of the impact, which knocked its first two carriages off the track and down a 4-meter (13-foot) slope. Bodies were found hundreds of meters from the crash site, according to Andalusia regional President Juanma Moreno.

Authorities continued their search Wednesday, finding a 43rd victim. Another 37 people remained hospitalized while 86 people were treated and discharged, regional officials said.

Authorities on Wednesday said they had identified almost all the victims from Sunday’s high-speed crash, but said they could still find more bodies.

Among the injured was Santiago Tavares, a Portuguese traveler who broke his leg.

“Minutes before the train crash I had a feeling that an accident would happen because the carriage was moving a lot,” Tavares told Portuguese broadcaster TVI. “Ten minutes later the accident happens, I started to fly ... Then, I woke up and I realized I was alive.”

Officials are investigating what caused both train crashes. Transport Minister Óscar Puente called Sunday's collision “truly strange” since it occurred on a straight section of track and neither train was speeding.

Puente said that officials had found a broken section of track that could be related to the origin of the crash, but insisted that it's just a hypothesis, and that it would take weeks to reach any conclusions.

Rail operator Adif said Wednesday the tracks in Adamuz passed the “usual inspections."

“No fault has been detected that, a priori, shows a relationship with the accident,” said Ángel García de la Bandera, Adif's director of traffic.

In August, the Spanish Union of Railway Drivers sent a letter asking Spain’s rail operator to investigate flaws on high-speed train lines across the country due to increased traffic. It warned of potholes, bumps and imbalances in overhead power lines as well as frequent breakdowns and damage to trains, according to a copy of the letter seen by The Associated Press.

The union said Wednesday it would be calling a general strike in the coming weeks to demand more safety assurances.

Puente and Renfe president Álvaro Fernández said both trains in Sunday's accident were traveling well under the speed limit of 250 kph (155 mph) and “human error could be ruled out.”

The crash shook a nation that leads Europe in high-speed train mileage with a cutting edge network of rail transport.

Naishadham reported from Madrid.

Police officers and firefighters inspect the damage after a commuter train derailed as a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks in Gelida, near Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

Police officers inspect the damage after a commuter train derailed as a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks in Gelida, near Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

Police officers and firefighters inspect the damage after a commuter train derailed as a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks in Gelida, near Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

View of the site of a train collision in Adamuz, southern Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Emergency crews respond after a commuter train derailed when a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks in Gelida, near Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

Emergency crews respond after a commuter train derailed when a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks in Gelida, near Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Hold on to those Thanksgiving turkeys! WKRP is coming to Cincinnati — for real this time.

“I cannot, by contract, tell you when. I cannot tell you who. But I can tell you, direct to the camera, WKRP, after 48 years, is coming to Cincinnati,” D.P. McIntire, who runs the media nonprofit that is auctioning the famous call letters, told The Associated Press. “Book it! It’s done!”

The call sign was made famous by “WKRP in Cincinnati,” a CBS television sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It made stars of actors like Loni Anderson and Richard Sanders, whose bumbling newsman Les Nessman reported on a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad when live but flightless turkeys were dropped from a helicopter.

McIntire remembers watching the show’s first episode — featuring disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) — in the living room with his parents and older sister.

“And at the end of the 30-minute episode,” he said, “I got up and I proclaimed, `I’m going to be in radio. And if I ever have the opportunity, I’m going to run a station called WKRP.’”

McIntire said he got his first on-air job at 13 as a news anchor at WNQQ “Wink FM” in Blairsville, Pennsylvania.

Fast forward to 2014, when his North Carolina-based nonprofit acquired the call sign from the Federal Communications Commission. Stations in Dallas, Georgia, and Alexandria, Tennessee, previously bore the letters.

McIntire laughs as he recalls his chat with a woman in the agency’s audio division.

He had two sets of call letters in mind. She told him he needed a third.

“Being the jokester that I am, I said, `Well, if you need three, and if it’s available, we’ll take WKRP,’” he said. “And 90 seconds later, she came back and she said, `Mr. McIntire. Congratulations. You’re the general manager of WKRP in Raleigh, North Carolina.’”

WKRP-LP — 101.9 on the FM dial — went live Nov. 30, 2015. The LP stands for “low power,” a class of station created to serve more local audiences that didn’t want mass-market content.

“Our format is what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America,” he said. "There is Greats of the ‘80s, Sounds of the ’70s, '90s Rewind," as well as local news and “specialty programming.”

LPFM is restricted to nonprofit organizations like his Oak City Media, and it’s definitely local.

“Your broadcast capacity is limited to 100 watts,” McIntire said. “So, your average range is between, depending on your terrain and circumstances, 4 and 12 miles (6 and 19 kilometers) in any direction. Enough to cover a small town.”

And, by necessity, it’s a low-budget affair.

The transmitter is in a corner of McIntire’s garage, between a recycling bin and the cleaning supplies. The broadcast antenna sits atop a 25-foot (7.62-meter) metal flagpole in the backyard. The studio — microphones and a mixing board hooked up to a computer — is on the first floor of McIntire’s home.

Like the WKRP of television, McIntire and his partners set out to be “irreverent.” One of their offerings is a two-hour show called “Weird Al and Friends,” focusing on the satirical works of Weird Al Yankovic.

They even had an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. But don’t call the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — they hand out gift certificates to a local grocery store.

“We don’t toss them out of helicopters,” he said with a laugh.

This news comes hot on the heels of the decision to shutter CBS News Radio after nearly a century in operation. After more than a decade on the air, the 56-year-old McIntire decided it was time to pass the reins.

“We’re in a position where the older members like me who started the station are turning the leadership over to younger members,” he said. “They’re not interested in radio.”

They put out a call for bids to use the call letters on FM and AM radio, as well as television and digital television.

They intend to use the proceeds for a new nonprofit venture called Independent Broadcast Consultants. He said IBC will be “geared specifically toward helping these new broadcasters get up and running, get the consulting that they need in order to be, hopefully, more successful than we have been.”

Oak City Media was all set to hand off the television-related suffixes — WKRP-TV and WKRP-DT — when another group defaulted on the agreement, McIntire said. But he said the Cincinnati deal is in the bag, he just can’t legally discuss it.

“It will be radio,” he said. “But that’s all I can tell you at this time.”

Robert Thompson, who uses a season 2 episode of “WKRP” in his TV history class at Syracuse University, said it’s telling that people see real value in a fictional station whose call letters invoke the word “crap.”

“The value comes from the love of the characters for each other,” he said. “And now by buying this thing, the value comes from our love of the characters themselves.”

Whatever they do with the call sign, McIntire hopes they will be true to the show that inspired it.

“It has a special place in the hearts of an awful lot of people,” he said. “And we have been very, very, very proud to have been a steward of that legacy.”

This story has been updated to correct that the studio is on the first floor of the home, not the basement.

D.P. McIntire leans against a deck beneath the WKRP radio antenna in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

D.P. McIntire points to the transmitter for WKRP radio in a corner of his garage in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

The WKRP radio antenna sits atop a 25-foot flagpole behind D.P. McIntire's home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

A photo of the cast members of the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" sits in a window at the home of D.P. McIntire in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

D.P. McIntire stands beneath a WKRP banner in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)