Aren’t trains supposed to be safe? This was the question most Greeks asked themselves after the fatal collision between a passenger and a freight train that took place on March 1st in the Tempi area of Central Greece. The crash cost the lives of 57 people, mostly young students returning home from Easter holidays. As it turned out, the trains in Greece were not safe at all. In fact, according to a 2022 report by the European Union Agency for Railways, Greece had the deadliest railway among 29 European nations even before the Tempi catastrophe.
The official inquiry into the disaster showed that, besides a series of grave errors made by the station master that night, there were no safety systems in place to prevent or correct the human errors. In the days following the catastrophe, the phrase “a serious accident was waiting to happen” was used many times by those working at the Greek railway.
Thanasis, 22, a driver for Hellenic Train, had the same opinion. Despite its name, Hellenic Train is a subsidiary of Trenitalia and is responsible for the operation of passenger and freight trains on the Greek railway lines. The state-owned Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) is responsible for running and maintaining the lines, as well as the accompanying infrastructure and systems (signals, stations, etc.).
That fateful night, Thanasis drove the IC62 passenger train from Athens up to Larisa, one station before the disaster. There, he changed shifts with his colleagues, who had to drive the IC62 to Thessaloniki. An hour later, they died from the collision. Thanasis learned about the accident on his way back to Athens.
“Shortly before we reached Thiva, we learned that something had happened because they called us from the Rentis train depot to ask if we were OK. At first, we did not give it much thought because we were told it was a derailment and derailments happen a lot. Afterwards, we learned that it was a head-on collision and that there were deaths. Shortly before we arrived in Athens, we began to see the first photos and videos [from the place of the accident],” he said.
According to the inquiry report, the absence of the European Train Control System (ETCS) played a central role in the disaster. ETCS is being used by the majority of European countries and it would have automatically stopped both trains when they entered a collision course. ETCS was installed gradually on Greek train engines from 2007 to 2018, but in order for it to be operational, the railway signals on the lines need to work.
However, gangs of copper thieves have for years been stealing cables from railway lines. The theft and selling of copper is dominated by Romani gangs called the “copper mafia”, but in many instances, OSE employees are also participating. In 2017, a high-ranking OSE director and seven other employees were arrested after they were found to have taken hundreds of thousands of euros in brides from these gangs. Due to its limited budget, OSE does not replace the stolen or damaged cables; as a result, the
signaling system that is essential for the operation of ETCS is constantly out of order. The lack of signaling has resulted in the Greek railway relying on an obsolete system of station masters. This leaves no space for human error, especially when all the traffic takes place on a single line, as was the case the night of the Tempi disaster.
Another railway driver, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals, described how vulnerable the Greek railway system really is to criminal organizations taking advantage of it.
“There are extensive copper wire thefts. Even a few days after the accident, wires for the signaling system were installed in Katerini; they were stolen the same night, a few hours after installation. There is a serious problem. The system started gradually getting out of order,” he said. The driver also spoke of human smuggling rings active on the railway.
During the last few years, the Greek railway system has become one of the main means of transport used by migrants and refugees attempting to reach Western Europe. This has attracted human smugglers looking for profit, creating a dangerous environment for workers and migrants. In August 2022, three migrants were killed in their sleep near Drama after they got hit by a train.
“There is a trafficking issue within the organization (OSE), migrants know inside information such as the train and route numbers, they know each train’s destination and they are prepared. People have come into the cab and offered me 2,000 euros to hide them inside. Obviously I refused.” stated the driver.
“Migrants sometimes hide even beneath the trains, when we find out, we immediately stop the train and call OSE, but they often tell us “What do you want us to do?”. Even the police do not come. If it arrives, it is usually just one run-down police cruiser with one police officer inside. Sometimes a train may have 90–100 people (migrants) on it,” he added.
Although copper theft and human trafficking are significant issues, the primary factor responsible for the decline of Greek railway is the severe budget cuts that have been implemented on OSE since 2010 as part of wider austerity policies. As a result, OSE gradually became underfunded and understaffed. It is telling that OSE went from employing around 6.000 people in 2010 to less than 1.000 people in 2021. This has led to many stations being left unmanned, while OSE employees sometimes have to work long hours, which makes them more prone to mistakes. Furthermore, the lack of funds means that damaged equipment and infrastructure cannot be easily repaired or replaced.
To make matters worse, the political clientelism that has plagued the Greek public sector for decades has also been present in OSE, with inexperienced individuals being given important positions within the organization simply because of their political ties. According to several reports in the Greek press, the station master who caused the tragedy was a political appointment of the ruling New Democracy party, who was given the job in 2022 after a few months of training, despite being 60 years old and lacking prior experience.
The lack of transparency in the Greek railway that creates a fertile soil for corruption to flourish goes hand-in-hand with a culture of silence. Every OSE employee we tried to contact refused to talk, with some of them implying their upper-ups had forbidden them to speak publicly. A couple of weeks after the accident, this toxic culture became evident during the visit of the ex-deputy minister of transportation, Michalis Papadopoulos, to the Larisa station. When Papadopoulos made inaccurate claims to the press regarding the station’s control board, the station master corrected the deputy minister and refuted his false claims. A high-ranking OSE director intervened, tapped the station master on the shoulder and coldly told him, “End it.” The station master complied and stopped talking immediately.
A few days after the disaster, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis referred to it as a “sacrifice” that would help the state to prevent similar disasters in the future. However, if someone roamed the streets during the almost daily large demonstrations in the weeks following the Tempi catastrophe, the word that he would see mostly written on placards and banners was “murder.” This shows that a sizable part of society did not attribute the accident to the convenient explanation of human error but considered the Greek state responsible for the dreadful condition of the country’s infrastructure, including its railway system.
Mitsotakis government, which managed to secure reelection in March with an impressive 41% of the vote, fast-tracked construction work, with the goal of having ETCS and signaling installed on the majority of the Athens-Thessaloniki line by November 2023.
Nevertheless, the disintegration of the Greek state’s capacity after 13 years of austerity makes it impossible to close a hole without opening another. In early September, catastrophic floods in Central Greece washed away the new constructions and destroyed a large part of the old railway infrastructure, prompting citizens to once again criticize the authorities for lack of preparedness. As a result, the work now has to start from scratch. “It will probably take us a lot of months to return the railway to the point it was 15 days ago [before the floods],” admitted the newly appointed Infrastructure and Transport Minister, Christos Staikouras, in a recent interview. ”The work [at the railway] will have been completed by 2026,” he concluded.