In the first official public acknowledgment of the problems with the rail network, officials also confirmed that the centre-right administration’s efforts to reform the system have failed, The Guardian reports.
“We are all devastated by this tragic incident,” government spokesman Yannis Oikonomou told a news conference. Yet amid mounting anger among residents of the country over how a head-on collision between two trains could have happened Tuesday night near Tempe, the official is our excuse, saying Greece is “huge and unwieldy.” especially now.” Authorities are investigating the causes of the accident and the delays in rail projects, he said, which he says “have their roots in the chronic ailments of the Greek transportation system … which the government has failed to eradicate.”
Protesters hurled stones at the offices of a railway company in Athens before being dispersed by tear gas fired by riot police. Protests also broke out in Thessaloniki. On Thursday, railway and subway workers went on strike.
The Hellenic Train services union said in a statement that the 24-hour strike was organized to protest “the lack of respect shown by successive governments to Greek railways, with a tragic result in Tempe.” Hellenic Train was one of many public service companies privatized in the midst of Greece’s protracted debt crisis.
Meanwhile, a Greek judge has ordered an urgent investigation into the theory that the long stretch of road leading to Athens International Airport, used by millions of foreign tourists every year, is operating without proper signage. The complaints were made by employees of the Railway Federation, who issued a televised call to action.
Meanwhile, the rescue operation was hampered by the fact that workers had to rely on special cutting machines to saw through the much mangled debris. At the time of the accident, at 11:20 p.m. Tuesday, several students were said to have gathered in the dining car, the second car, which felt the full force of the head-on collision. They took an overnight train to Thessaloniki in the Greek capital after a three-day holiday weekend. “It was a student train full of guys in their 20s,” Kostas Bargiotas, a senior orthopedic doctor at the local hospital, told Skai TV. “It was a real shock, the cars were crumpled up like paper.”
While the search is expected to continue in the coming days, any chance of finding survivors has all but evaporated, rescuers said, adding that temperatures in the two front cars that exploded could have exceeded 1,300 degrees Celsius. According to local media reports, the grim process of identifying victims has become more difficult because, in most cases, forensic experts had to work only with cremated body parts. Family members desperately searching for their loved ones were forced to provide DNA samples so that the bodies could be identified and released to the families.
