On 24 July 2013, the eve of Galicia's National Day, a train en route from Madrid to Ferrol, in northern Galicia, jumped tracks on a bend in the area of Angrois as it neared Galicia's capital city, Santiago de Compostela. The train crash, the worst in Spanish history since another train going from Madrid to Galicia crashed into a locomotive in the Bierzo area in 1944, left a death toll of seventy-nine and over a hundred injured, as well as a thick cloud of confusion and susceptibility to political interpretation. Historical and economic explanations for the catastrophe were perhaps best captured by the Galician writer and journalist Miguel Anxo Murado, who in his article for The Guardian contextualized the accident as the tragically foregone conclusion of Spain's decades-long obsession with ‘fast money and fast trains’, of which Galician contemporary transport policies had been both a part and a product (Murado 2013). But in the flurry of views trying to explain the event either as a ‘freak tragedy’ – with the train driver as the sole culprit – or as the accountable result of draconian austerity measures and hasty planning, much reaction and commentary around the Santiago de Compostela train crash cannot be understood without reference to the very particular characteristics of Galician-Spanish relations. The unfurling of media interest and coverage was eloquent in this regard.