Crucially, at one level a controller instructed a stalled prepare to restart, clearing it to advance at up to 160km/h (100 mph) even though a second prepare was caught on the line up forward.

The impending collision was clear from audio calls and on large screens in the management centre in Madrid.

“They worked. We checked. They could see what was happening,” Puente confirmed. But the advancing prepare was never ordered to cease.

“I’m no judge… But these are the facts.”

So would he take private and political duty anyway, and resign? Puente called it his “duty”, rather, to stay as minister.

“I’ll face up to things, explain, elucidate,” he countered. “I’ll think how to improve the system, and give confidence to those who want to travel by train and feel calm and safe.”

But Spaniards will take a lot of persuading.

“This is not only a very serious accident, but the second in a very short time,” Paco Camas of the pollster Ipsos factors out.

An investigation into January’s crash in Adamuz, close to Cordoba, is still open, with preliminary reports suggesting there was a crack in the rails – very completely different to the newest collision.

But there is a related impression.

“It destroys people’s confidence not only in the railways but institutions in general,” Camas warns. “And in Spain when such things happen, we know that people blame their government.”

For Team Sánchez it is the newest in a spiral of crises.

Allegations of corruption against the prime minister’s shut relations still persist, all denied.

Then there was a sudden inflow of migrants from Morocco this summer time to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. That got right-wing opponents shouting about incompetence and underfunding.

Later, a video of a pensioner being forcibly evicted from her house went viral and sparked avenue protests.

That’s when Sánchez called an early election.

His probabilities of successful the vote seemed slim even before the prepare crash. Now they have plummeted.