There is no doubt whatsoever that trains are far safer than cars. But often that fact is used as an excuse to not invest in safety. "We don't need to do anything to make thing X safer, because look at that other thing Y that people do which is way more dangerous." (I assume you didn't mean it that way, but some people really do make this argument.)

Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!

The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.

Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.

Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.

What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.

People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.

> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place

I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.

> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed

As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.

I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.