Description
"Yet another tragedy caused by a hideous railway privatisation. Paddington 1999, Larissa 2023." tweeted ex-Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. The deadly collision of a passenger Athens to Thessaloniki Intercity service and a freight train near Larissa with over 40 deaths and many more missing, is the sum of problems accentuated by the privatization of the Greek railways in 2017, part of Greece's international bailout programme. Railway employee representatives and unions had officially protested many times in the recent past pointing out the lack of signalling and warned that a tragic accident was imminent. According to many sources, key elements of the tragedy are a drive for profit maximization, mismanagement, understaffing and lack of training, and conflicting responsibilities between the privatised railway operator, Trainose renamed Hellenic Train, owned by Italy's Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, and the old OSE (Hellenic Railways Organization), responsible for stations and infrastructure, still controlled by the Greek state. The ageing network still has single tracks in many places while signalling and automatic control systems have not yet been installed necessitating manual control and communication over radio. Just two weeks before Greece had been referred by the EU Commission to the EU Court of Justice for failings in its railway infrastructure. The Minister of Transport resigned a few hours after the tragedy, and the Larissa Station Manager responsible for signalling was arrested but the blame game is only just beginning, a couple of months before the general elections.
Location
Larissa