Dozens dead in train collision in Greece

At least 36 people died after two trains collided north of Larissa, in central Greecereported from the Fire Department, and 66 people were hospitalized, six of them in intensive care units.

In total, about 130 people were injured, and passengers are still being searched for among the remains of the trains.

Firefighters estimate that the death toll is likely to rise, since there are another dozen corpses among the remains of the third passenger car, where they pulled out the last two lifeless bodies.

The most seriously injured are in the hospital in Larissa.

In two trains, one passenger and the other commercial, 346 passengers and 20 crew members were traveling, explained the railway company Hellenic Train, which since 2017 belongs to the Italian group FS Italiane.

The passenger train ran on the Athens-Thessaloniki route, while the commercial train, probably transporting sheet metal, ran on the Thessaloniki-Athens route.

The trains collided shortly before midnight local time near Tempe, a small town located in the valley where the railway tunnel is located, about 300 kilometers north of Athens.

In the accident, several wagons derailed, and at least three caught fire.

According to local media, the head of the station and the representative of the company were questioned by the police, and the prosecutor’s office issued an order to investigate the cause of the accident.

Everything indicates that the trains, both carriers of Hellenic Train, were traveling on the same track at high speed at the time of the accident, which is why the train drivers and other crew members died in the accident. The first investigations point to human error.

The president of the train drivers’ union in Greece, Kostas Geridunias, condemned the deteriorating condition of the country’s railway infrastructure on private television ERT.

“Nothing works, everything is done manually, we are in manual mode on the entire Athens-Thessalonica axis. The traffic lights don’t work either. If they had, the drivers would have seen the red lights and stopped in time,” he said.

For these reasons, drivers are almost entirely dependent on the information they receive from the heads of the competent stations, Geridunias emphasized.