Final report on the Glória funicular crash slips to 2027
Portugal's rail accident investigator has missed its own 3 September deadline. It issued six safety recommendations instead — four to Carris, two to the transport regulator — and both accepted them.
Next Thursday marks a year since the Glória funicular came off its track on the descent towards Restauradores. Sixteen people died and 23 were hurt. That anniversary was also the deadline the investigators had set themselves for the final report, and it will not be met: the GPIAAF says its conclusions are now expected near the end of the first quarter of 2027, because the technical testing is still running.
What arrived instead was a set of formal safety recommendations. Six of them. Four go to Carris, the municipal operator, and two to the IMT, the transport regulator, and both bodies have already accepted them in writing.
What the investigators want changed
One recommendation tells Carris to overhaul how it buys, receives and installs components that are critical to vehicle safety. That is dry language pointing at a specific thing — the haulage cable. The preliminary report, out in October 2025, found irregularities in how the cables were procured, while stopping short of saying whether those irregularities caused the crash.
A second asks for a critical review of the safety management system covering the electric fleet and the funiculars, assessing the risks the service poses to passengers and to people around it. Carris has responded with an external audit of electric-mode maintenance, a compliance project for its integrated management system, and a materials categorisation project.
The IMT’s two recommendations were accepted almost immediately and folded into draft legislation on metropolitan and light rail systems that was already being written. The legal status of the funiculars is one of the points where Carris openly disagreed with the preliminary report, arguing that technical regulation and oversight of the Glória and Lavra funiculars belong to the regulator rather than to the operator.
The criminal case is separate
Two processes are running at once, and they are easy to conflate. A safety investigation looks for causes, not blame — that is the point of it. The criminal inquiry is a different track, and it now has three formal suspects: the former head of electric-mode maintenance at Carris, the manager of the maintenance contractor, and the company itself. Under Portuguese law that status confers defence rights. It is not a conviction.
The Glória and Lavra funiculars remain closed. A panel drawn from the national civil engineering laboratory, the Instituto Superior Técnico and the engineers’ professional body is assessing what it would take to reopen Lisbon’s lifts, and that assessment — more than the GPIAAF report — is what determines when a yellow cabin climbs the Calçada da Glória again. We have covered the city’s network before, when the Cais do Sodré metro station closed in August and after the fatal bus collision in Agualva-Cacém.
Image: Jorge Franganillo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
