Traffic is gradually being restored after the train disaster in Greece

Three weeks after train services were halted following a rail disaster in Greece, services partially resumed on Wednesday, March 22.

According to railway company Hellenic Train, only some long-distance lines around Athens are open for passenger traffic, namely the one connecting Piraeus, the main port near Athens, to Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, 40 kilometers from the capital. On Wednesday afternoon, a dozen passengers waited on the platform for a train to the airport, which is very popular with both tourists and residents of the Attica region around the Greek capital.

The line, where a fatal collision between a passenger train and a freight train occurred in Tempe on February 28th, will not be back in service until February 1st.^Eh According to the new Minister of Transport, Giorgi Gerapetritis, April. It is the main line of the country, 600 kilometers long and connects Athens with Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city in the north.

Freight train services providing commercial transit between Greece and central Europe will not resume until the end of March, authorities said. All regular routes should be restored within five weeks, the minister said last week.

Security questions

Questions about the reliability of service remained abound on Wednesday’s trains, while the Tempe disaster, which killed 57 people, exposed a flaw in the railroad’s crumbling safety systems. “We are called to move on the day after the tragic event that shook us all”, said Panayiotis Terezakis, the new Director General of the Organization of Public Railways (OSE), who replaced his predecessor, who was fired a few days after the tragedy. He assured her that he would “Everything that is humanly possible to restore passenger confidence” and “Put the country’s trains back into operation”.

Giorgi Gerapetritis last week promised additional security measures, including two drivers on long-distance trains and “Three assistants instead of the previous two in long-distance passenger trains between Athens and Thessaloniki”.

The accident, which was largely attributed to an error by the station master on duty that evening, was the worst known to Greece, and also revealed some negligence on the part of the state in modernizing train safety systems. Rail transport in Greece is relatively underdeveloped and covers only 2,100 kilometers. A dense network of buses serves the main cities and villages of the country.

The day after the accident, the then Minister of Transport, Kostas Karamanlis, resigned. After the disaster, large, often violent, angry protests erupted in Athens and other cities, pointing the finger at successive Greek governments for neglecting train safety. Under pressure, the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, announced on Tuesday evening that general elections would be held in May, without specifying an exact date.