The Financial Times is hosting an extensive article on Greek railways after the tragic accident in Tempe.

The article noted that the trains were back on the tracks, but “the country is still struggling to identify those responsible for the years of neglect, mismanagement and corruption that led to the accident.”

The crash that left 57 dead “turned into a moment of reckoning over the failure of successive governments and international creditors to transform a rail operator that had amassed €11 billion in debt. Former executives said the company had a culture of mismanagement, political settlements and a lack of interest in improving network security.”

Focusing on the accident, the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis decided last month to postpone the parliamentary elections by one month to May 21. “I am lucky to be alive in this country. I am ashamed to live in Greece,” said Vassiliki Oikonomaki, a 19-year-old studying physical therapy in Thessaloniki and one of the survivors of the accident. “We are all to blame, as we have done nothing all these years,” he said a few days after the crash.

Passenger traffic between Athens and Thessaloniki resumed on Monday for the first time since the accident, with Transport Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis giving assurances that safety has been restored to the line. He said the authorities are rushing to complete the signaling and remote control system by September in accordance with international safety standards. This system was supposed to be installed in 2016, but was postponed seven times. Experts argue that if the system had been in place the crash would have been avoided.

Because the scheme was partly funded by EU money, the European prosecutor in 2021 launched an investigation into the tender, suspecting that the bloc’s financial interests might be at risk.

The causes of the accident are not fully known and the investigation is ongoing. The station master on duty has been charged with manslaughter and his case is pending in the Greek courts.

The crash was a foreboding disaster, according to former officials and transportation experts, given the poor state of infrastructure and the debt OSE had accumulated in the years before the crisis.

The picture provided by former officials and executives involved in the state railway shows that successive governments spent millions of EU and Greek euros on overpriced investments that were never completed, appointed unqualified executives and left the railway under-equipped and under-maintained.

“It is the worst version of the state, the last vestige of a state Soviet system, ruled by vested interests,” said Thanasis Zeliaskopoulos, former CEO of TRAINOSE. “Investments were made based on political criteria and not based on what the market needed.”

In 2010 the country’s creditors found the railway company 11 billion euros in debt and it was ordered to become financially viable. And while it did to some extent, the company never really reformed.

In the years leading up to Greece’s financial collapse, the railway company’s debt was growing by 55% a year. When Zeliaskopoulos took over as head of TRAINOSE in 2010, “the company was facing financial chaos,” he said. It faced an annual deficit of €240 million just to continue operations.

In one of the first meetings with IMF representatives in the spring of 2010, Zeliaskopoulos recalled one of them shouting “shut it down!”, as it was considered a problem without a solution.

When the terms of Greece’s bailout were drawn up, the “troika” demanded that the railway’s operational activities be made profitable.

One of the measures was the reduction of staff. Greece’s railways employed 12,500 people in 2010. After the troika’s involvement, just 2,600 remained employed by OSE, and in 2021 the numbers were further reduced to 2,000.

Takis Theofanopoulos, who took over as OSE president in 2010, said that as experienced train and station workers reached retirement age, “I knew we would soon face shortages that would be difficult to deal with.”

Other restructuring measures included curtailing the generous wage deals that unions had secured for the railways and reducing rail services with few passengers. However, the culture was slow to change. Fuel was constantly being stolen from the company’s stocks and free tickets were handed out as political favors, with the company struggling to turn a profit, according to Zeliaskopoulos.

Well aware of the deteriorating infrastructure, he tried to react by appointing additional security personnel. “I wasn’t sleeping soundly at night,” he said.

Another challenge to network security was frequent copper theft. “It was impossible to protect 2,500 kilometers of rail without an organized plan by the police and the secret services,” said Theofanopoulos, who noted that the problem remains. Even if a modern signaling system were installed on the tracks, it would end up being stolen, he said.

Immediately after Greece exited its reform program in 2018, the additional layers of security put in place in previous years began to be phased out.

TRAINOSE was sold to Italy’s state-owned railway company, which was renamed Hellenic Train in 2022 and took control of passenger and freight operations, while OSE retained control of the network.

“The responsibilities were removed from the train supervisor, while the control center in Athens was split in two,” Retsinas said. “With these changes, it was only a matter of time before an accident happened.”