About half an hour after Fernando Seco’s train left Madrid on Wednesday morning, taking him home to Seville after a business trip, it stopped for a few minutes. A voice on the loudspeaker said there was heavy traffic.
The train then started to move again — and after a while, Mr. Seco said, there was a “very violent crash.” He would soon learn that his train, run by Renfe, Spain’s national rail provider, had rear-ended another one, leaving dozens of people dead. Mr. Seco, 62, felt the impact all the way at the back of the train, where he was sitting, he recalled in an interview. He said his carriage filled with screams and panic as people rushed to get off.
He and other passengers climbed down an embankment. Farmhands working in a nearby field, he said, cut through a fence so the passengers could pass through.
That was when Mr. Seco saw, further ahead, train carriages that had been completely derailed.
“A rail beam had pierced right through a carriage from bottom to top, like carving meat,” Mr. Seco. He said he and others rushed to those carriages and found dead and injured people, “trapped in a twisted tangle of metal and wreckage.”
It was quiet, said Mr. Seco, who believed it was because people were so hurt that they couldn’t speak. He and others began working to free passengers from the wreckage. That was when the screaming started, he said.
He and the others moved at least a dozen people from the train, using parts of the wreckage as makeshift stretchers. Doctors who were among the passengers treated the wounded in what became a field hospital among a grove of almond trees.
When he finally left, Mr. Seco said, it was with the help of goatherds, who drove him to a sports pavilion in the nearby town of Urda. There, friends picked him up to drive him home to Seville.
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