A commuter train has crashed into a buffer at Barcelona’s França station leaving 54 people injured, one of them seriously.



Emergency services said the train was coming into the Catalan capital from the village of Sant Vicenç de Calders in Tarragona on the R2 line of the Rodalies commuter rail service.

The force of the crash, which happened at 7.15am local time on Friday, crumpled the front of the train against the buffer and detached a sheet of metal.

Twenty of the injured, including the driver, were taken to hospital while paramedics treated others on the platform. Many of the passengers had been standing, ready to get off, when the train crashed, the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia reported.

One passenger told El País: “It felt like an earthquake but we were lucky.”

Pictures showed the driver’s cab partially covered with a blue tarpaulin.

Politicians including the Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, and Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, visited the scene shortly after the crash. Both tweeted their thanks to the emergency services.

Josep Rull, the Catalan minister for territory and sustainability, said he had spoken to the driver who was in shock, but said things would have been far worse had the train not been coming into the station at low speed.

The state-run railway company Adif said an investigation had been opened.



Reuters contributed to this report