In one serious complaint regarding the operation of the trains on the Athens-Thessaloniki line where the tragedy occurred with 32 dead after a collision between a passenger train and a commercial train at the height of Tempi, the president of the train drivers of the OSE proceeded.

As he told ERT, Kostas Genidounias “nothing works, everything is done manually, we are in manual and throughout the Athens-Thessaloniki axis. The traffic lights don’t work either, if they did the drivers would see the red lights and stop in time.”

To the question whether this means that train drivers move to blindly, the president of the train drivers replied that “the information is given from station master to station master by radio. The stationmaster tells us in Athens you will go to Menidi, then to Oinoi, in total this is done 15 times from Athens to Thessaloniki”.

According to him “there were electronic systems, they don’t work, ask the people in charge”.

Asked about the circumstances of the accident, he said that “at the point there is a double line, one going up, one going down, I don’t know why the trains were on the same line”.

“We follow orderss. Wherever they tell us to go. Along the entire length of the route, the line is double. If at some point there are works, there are branches. Everything is done manually and empirically. It’s been years that the systems have not been working” concluded the president of the OSE train drivers speaking to ERT.