Three hundred passengers 'trapped' for 12 hours in stifling heat inside halted Malaga-bound high-speed train

A high-speed AVE train from Madrid to Malaga left at 7.35pm on Monday night, with a slight delay to the scheduled service from the Spanish capital to the Costa del Sol. However, the passengers did not know what awaited them on the journey. After only 20 minutes, the train stopped in the town of La Sagra in Toledo, but it was far from being the only train that was halted on its way, as a power failure affected at least nine other trains. However, this was the only train that has remained parked-up for more than 12 hours.

At 8.30am this Tuesday morning, Malaga-based lawyer Manuel Jiménez Baras, who is travelling with his three children (10, 13 and 14), still had no information about how the situation was going to be resolved. His family is among the almost 300 passengers who spent the night inside the train, in the middle of nowhere. Seeing as the motors were switched off, they spent the hours in suffocating heat, with no air conditioning and only a little bit of breeze coming in from outside.

Jiménez Baras described a Dantesque situation, which he said should not happen in this century in a country like Spain. An elderly woman had to be evacuated from the train by a mobile intensive care ambulance crew after fainting, while another was given oxygen. Other passengers suffered panic or anger attacks.

"My little daughter asked me: 'Daddy, please don't put me on a train again in my life'," the lawyer said. There are also a few babies inside the train. "They have spent the whole night crying, the heat is unbearable."

What the passengers do not understand is why they were not taken off the train. There is access to the train via a service lane, which is how both the Guardia Civil, who monitored the situation during the night and brought them food and water, and the mobile ICU reached them. In addition, Jiménez Baras said that at least nine trains had passed by them, along the parallel track, but not one stopped to take them at least back to Madrid. "The Guardia Civil tell us that they do not have an evacuation order."

"We have been here for more than 12 hours, this is an illegal detention. People are very nervous. This morning, when they opened the doors, some of them went out to walk, we are desperate," Jiménez Baras told SUR this morning.

At 9am, there was still no resolution. "Renfe has been sending SMS messages all night and saying that in 90 minutes it would be fixed? That at 8am we were going to be in Malaga? It is absolute incompetence," Jiménez Baras said.

As a lawyer, he has already been in touch with a colleague of his to prepare legal action against the state railway company (Renfe) for "illegal detention".

The only comment from Renfe was that a train on the Murcia-Malaga route, with a stopover in Madrid, stopped at La Sagra at 8.26pm on Monday. After studying several possible solutions, the plan is to "transfer passengers to an AVE Madrid-Malaga train in double composition". At 9.20am, the train for this operation was scheduled to depart from Atocha in Madrid "shortly". However, passengers said that they had been told that they would be towed by another train to Atocha.

According to Renfe, at 9.45pm on Monday, just over an hour after the incident, most of the other stopped trains resumed their service.

Information from the railway infrastructure company (Adif) said the breakdown happened because of a train from Toledo to Madrid, which had damaged the catenary overhead power cable on Monday afternoon. Engineers repaired part of the catenary to make one of the two tracks available. However, the full repair was scheduled for 9.30am this Tuesday morning. The delay has affected dozens of trains throughout the southern rail corridor and within Andalucía.