The 40 people killed in Spain’s deadliest train crash in more than a decade included a police officer, journalists and a family returning from a musical.

Salvador Jiménez was on a high-speed train to Madrid on Sunday evening, speeding through the arid countryside of southern Spain, when the carriage shook so violently that he thought it had hit an animal on the tracks.

The lights went out. A voice on the public-address system made a plea for medical assistance. Soon the passengers were breaking windows with emergency hammers to escape, Mr. Jiménez, 37, said in an interview.

The collision turned out to be with another train, killing at least 40 people in the deadliest railway crash in Spain since 2013. Two cars at the back of Mr. Jiménez’s Madrid-bound train derailed near Adamuz, a town in southern Spain, where they crossed onto the track of an oncoming southbound train, according to a preliminary report by official investigators. Seconds later, at around 7:45 p.m., the southbound train slammed into the carriages, and two cars careened down a 12-foot embankment, the preliminary report said.

“It was like an earthquake,” said Mr. Jiménez, a broadcast journalist.

The crash left Spaniards in grief and shock, shaking a country that has come to depend, and take great pride in, its sprawling and efficient national rail system, the largest high-speed system in Europe and second largest in the world, behind China.

“Spanish society is asking what happened, how it happened, and how this tragedy could have occurred,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at a media briefing near the crash site on Monday. He said officials would strive to answer the questions about what happened on tracks, switches and junctions that were renovated only in May and with a new train that had been inspected as recently as Thursday.

Neither the privately owned northbound train carrying around 300 passengers or the southbound one operated by Spain’s state-owned rail operator was speeding, officials said.

“The accident is extremely strange,” Óscar Puente, Spain’s transport minister, told reporters, saying it took place on a straight stretch of track. He warned that the death toll was “not final” and that “all the experts we have consulted are extremely baffled” about what happened.

Initial questions have centered on whether the crash was caused by the condition of the track. Mr. Puente said on Spanish radio that investigators are assessing whether a break in a section of track at the site of the derailment was “the cause or the consequences” of the derailment. But he warned that this was only speculation for now, and urged patience.

Íñaki Barrón, president of the Railway Accident Investigation Commission, said in an interview with RTVE that the crash did not seem a result of human error or a problem with signals, and that the cause could lie in “the interaction between the track and the vehicle.”

The impact of the crash was so severe that bodies were found hundreds of yards from the crash location, according to a broadcast interview with Juanma Moreno, the president of the regional government of Andalucía, the province where the crash occurred.

“Some of the dead are difficult to recognize,” Mr. Moreno said, adding that DNA analysis was being used to identify victims. “The impact was very strong, very strong.”

Emergency workers were still working desperately on Monday evening to reach bodies believed to be under overturned carriages.

The sound of the crash startled people within earshot.

Andrés Pastor Valverde, 53, a metalworker who lives nearby, was watching his son’s soccer game when he heard the crash, followed by a stream of sirens and alarms.

The mayor of Adamuz, Rafael Ángel Moreno, was one of the first people on the scene, rushing to the train station with a police officer.

“A terrible scene,” he said in an interview, his voice quavering. “People were trying to get out of the train, there were many injured.”

Gonzalo Sánchez Aguilar, 46, happened to be driving near the crash site and went to help. He loaded injured survivors into his car to rush them to a hospital, he said in an interview. “I saw a lot of dead bodies,” he said. “Really bad injuries.”

The scale of the disaster shocked veteran doctors who found themselves treating the victims.

Francisco Alamillos, 63, a surgeon, was reading in bed on Sunday evening when he received a message from Reina Sofía Hospital in the nearby city of Córdoba, where he works.

“100 injured people,” the message read.

Mr. Alamillos and his wife, also a surgeon, sped to the hospital, where the entrance was jammed with doctors coming to help, and the wards were filling up with survivors injured with pelvic fractures, lower-limb fractures, and facial injuries. “I had never seen so many injured patients at the same time,” he said.

The scenes shook a population that makes regular use of its national rail network. In a country of nearly 50 million, more than 40 million passengers traveled on Spain’s high-speed rail carriers in 2024, a 77 percent increase from 2019, according to an annual report from the country’s National Commission of Markets and Competition.

Once operated primarily by the Spanish national provider Renfe, Spain’s high-speed lines have been increasingly opened to private train service providers in recent years as part of a liberalization process prompted by European Union regulations. Beginning in 2021, providers like the French company Ouigo and Italy’s Iryo — which operated one of the trains involved in the crash — began offering passenger services on Spanish rail.

The Spanish Union of Railway Drivers said it had sent a letter in August asking the state-owned rail operator and Spain’s railway safety agency to look into possible flaws on lines across Spain, including at the site where the trains crashed. The union emphasized on Monday that it did not know the cause of the tragedy, but asserted that railway infrastructure had deteriorated because of increased traffic.

The union did not say whether it had received a response to the letter. The rail operator and the rail safety agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The identities of the victims emerged steadily throughout Monday. María Clauss and Óscar Toro, a married couple, were killed in the train derailment, according to an announcement by a union of journalists they belonged to. The Spanish National Police confirmed an officer was among the dead. On Facebook, members of the Zamorano Álvarez family said they were mourning the loss of four relatives.

Others were still waiting on Monday evening for news about loved ones.

In Córdoba, Manuel de la Torre was hoping for news of his 79-year-old aunt, one of five family members who were in the first car of the southbound train. His relatives, including three of his aunt’s grandchildren, were returning from seeing a musical. Some suffered broken bones, he said, but he has yet to hear about his aunt.

“People are just waiting, not knowing whether it’s good or bad,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But after a whole day now, you don’t expect happy news.”

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