Greece’s intercity trains went under private management in 2017, when the Italian public company Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane (FS) acquired the network — but state company OSE owns the tracks.
In the past five years, there were a series of near-misses before the country’s worst train disaster on Tuesday, which has claimed at least 57 lives.
In terms of automated safety, parts of Greece’s network are still in the 1960s, George Karagiannidis, a professor of digital telecommunication systems at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, told state TV ERT on Friday.
The following list of incidents does not include some two dozen other cases in the last five years involving trains colliding with people or vehicles trying to cross the tracks.
In a statement Friday, FS said the Greek state company OSE retained “tasks and responsibilities for the maintenance, management and technological modernisation of the railway network as well as being responsible for train traffic and circulation”.
November 2019
Two trains collide at Renti station near the port of Piraeus. Reports at the time cite human error in a train switch as the cause. No one is hurt.
August 2020
The suburban train to Athens airport derails just outside Xilokastro station in the Peloponnese. No one is hurt.
October 2021
A train derails near Thessaloniki station. OSE at the time blames the incident on excessive speed. No one is hurt.
December 2021
The suburban train derails near Renti station. No one is hurt, but he main opposition Syriza party warns that rail infrastructure is poorly maintained, endangering passenger safety. Rail sector trade unionists also warn that new OSE staff are being hired without proper qualifications.
June 2022
A train derails near the northern city of Drama after hitting a fallen tree on the tracks. No one is hurt.
August 2022
A train hits a cow, is immobilised, and later derails just outside the station of Tithorea, central Greece. According to reports at the time, the incident was caused by a track switch error.
October 2022
A train derails near Lianokladi, central Greece. Three people on board are unhurt.
A few days later, another train derails near Tithorea station. No one is hurt. According to train staff, it was derailed on purpose by the local station master to avoid a collision with another incoming train.
At the time, the head of the Greek train drivers’ union, Kostas Genidounias, told Ethnos daily: “What saves the system is the experience of drivers, and the fact that we don’t have a large circulation of trains.”
At the end of the month, a train driver is electrocuted after his engine runs into a hanging high-voltage wire.
Train unionists file a legal complaint, warning about the poor state of the tracks, the lack of maintenance and faulty signals.
They also noted that an automated safety system designed as a safety net against human error “has never operated despite being installed on train engines”.
Source: AFP
