MADRID — The driver was on the phone with a colleague and apparently looking at a document as his train barreled ahead at 95 miles per hour, almost twice the speed limit. Suddenly, a notorious curve was upon him.
He hit the brakes too late.
The train, carrying 218 passengers in eight carriages, hurtled off the tracks and slammed into a concrete wall, killing 79 people.
On Tuesday, investigators looking into the crash announced their preliminary findings from analysis of the train’s data-recording ‘‘black boxes,’’ suggesting that human error appears to be the cause of Spain’s worst railway disaster in decades.
The derailment occurred near Santiago de Compostela, a city in northwestern Spain, late last Wednesday. Some 66 people injured in the crash are still hospitalized, 15 of them in critical condition.
The accident cast a pall over the city, which is the last stop for the faithful who make it to the end of the El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that has drawn Christians since the Middle Ages. The crash occurred on the eve of annual festivities at the shrine, which subsequently were canceled.
The disaster also stunned the rest of Spain, with Spanish royals and political leaders joining hundreds of people in Santiago de Compostela’s 12th-century cathedral Monday evening to mourn the dead.
The train had been going as fast as 119 miles per hour shortly before the derailment, and the driver braked ‘‘seconds before the crash,’’ according to the statement. The speed limit on the section of track where the crash happened was 50 miles per hour.