"You feel like Russian roulette, you don't know what's going to happen," Manuel Huerta tells CGTN at Atocha station in Madrid, just days after a second multiple-fatality high speed rail accident in less than ten months.

"It used to be like the most safe transport media and now I'm wondering - is it?" Says Natalia Bermejo, who had to come to Madrid from Barcelona to sit an exam to enter Spain's civil service.

Trust has been shattered in what was once a source of national pride.

As the dead are slowly and painstakingly identified from the horrific crash at Urda, Toledo, on Wednesday October 28, and families slowly receive the worst news imaginable, the anger is growing at politicians and at the management of the train system.

A protest the night of the accident happened outside the Transport Ministry where an angry crowd of around 200 people lit fires, chanted that the Transport Minister Oscar Puente was a 'murderer' and called for both his resignation and for that of the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, before police dispersed the crowds with baton charges and rubber bullets.

Neither the Minister nor the PM have stepped down and Puente gave a two-hour long press conference on Friday saying “It wasn't my job to be in the control room on Wednesday.”

How did Spain's train crash happen?

The Transport Minister has repeatedly stated that the evidence points to human error as the cause of Wednesday's crash that left at least 69 people dead.

Puente laid out the facts saying that the LZB automatic safety system went down at 8:30am on Wednesday morning which automatically puts the human operatives in the control room in Madrid in command of directing trains.

It's a frequent thing that happens Puente continued, sections of the train go offline for all kinds of reasons, including communications failures and even when people try and steal sections of cables to sell them for the valuable copper inside.

The system has gone down 170 times already this year Puente stated, and there is protocol in place to be followed by the human controllers in Atocha, Madrid.

When the LZB system went offline, all trains on the track were stopped, but a controller gave permission to a Renfe train traveling south to Seville to restart its journey, somehow they missed an Iryo train stuck on the track only around 20 minutes away.

The Renfe train can travel at 200kmh and appears to have smashed into the back of the stationary Iryo train at close to 160kmh, apparently after a desperate attempt to slam on the breaks by the driver, witnesses talking about a haunting breaking sound right before impact.

"Inexplicable," is the word Puente used to describe the fact that the driver of Iryo train called the control center twice to warn that their train failed to restart and they were stuck still on the track.

A leaked audio from inside the control room at the critical moment when permission was given to the Renfe train to continue has been heard on practically every Spanish media and appears to support Puente's version of events.

"Reinitiate your journey at normal speed," the controller in Madrid is allegedly heard saying.

Train operators blame broader system faults

But rail employees reject using one control-room operator as a scapegoat.

"We are angry," Diego Martin, president of the Federation of European Train Drivers Unions said at Atocha at a train operators strike a day after the accident.

"Unfortunately they're trying to put all the responsibility on us, the train workers and not on the system when we are forced to work with degraded and faulty systems."

“We have to respect the investigation and come to a final analysis without jumping to conclusions.” Raquel Gonzalez, the Rail Secretary General of the UGT Union added.

One piece of infrastructure that has come under scrutiny is the automatic LZB system - a system installed in the early nineties - the one that has gone offline 170 times this year alone.

CGTN spoke to Dr. Lei Chen, Professor of Railway Operation and Control at the University of Birmingham for an independent opinion.

"The LZB system actually automatically stopped the trains in the first instance, right? That means the fail safe design is acknowledged, which means the LBZ system is still safe. But after it was taken over by the manual control centres, so I think there might be some human errors."

Analysis that appears to support the government's initial findings, but what needs to happen next?

“Both the railway maintenance and operation management need to be further enhanced, including technical investments, management training, etc.”

Investment - or the lack of it - is also under scrutiny during Sanchez' eight year term in office:

Only 16% of Spain's high-speed rail budget goes to maintenance and upgrades, lower than in Germany or Switzerland according to European Commission data and train travel in Spain has doubled since 2019, opening up its rail network to private companies.

The accusation some are making is that Spain doubled its rail traffic without doubling the spending on maintenance and systems upgrades, putting the humans in the loop under more pressure.

Some experts have suggested that Spanish politicians were more interested in shiny new headline-grabbing infrastructure than the nuts and bolts of important maintenance projects.

Both the Institute for Economic Studies (IEE) and the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie) estimated a maintenance investment shortfall in March reports, and

The Spanish government rejected that idea and defended their record, stating that Adif's maintenance spending has increased significantly - growing from USD800 million to nearly 1.3 billion dollars (a 60% nominal rise) over the eight years that this government has been in power.

With general elections at the end of November opposition leader Alberto Nuñez Feijoo claims that Spain has “lost its culture of security,” and far-right party VOX leader Santiago Abascal called the government “a criminal organization” responsible for these tragedies.

The disasters have only widened a deep political divide and thrown more petrol on the fires of polarisation.

Meanwhile as families continue to mourn their unspeakable loss, people at train stations around the country just want some kind of assurance that it's still safe to take a train.