With a special emotional charge, the transitional CEO of OSE, Panagiotis Terezakis, testified his experience to the parliamentary inquiry committee, describing the fatal mistakes which led to the train tragedy on the night of February 28, 2023.

“44 years on the trains, I’ve never seen so many mistakes made at the same time as that night”, Mr. Terezakis characteristically said, explaining that the local panel gave the stationmaster the same possibilities as remote control, with a shorter line length. As he argued, the stationmaster was obliged to draw the route automatically, which he did not do.

“Leaving Larissa, he is in front of 2 key groups. He had arranged the 117 key to cross the Intercity. Something intervened that caught his attention and he did not do the engraving, even manually. The board showed him the points that were changes,” said Mr. Terezakis, adding that “if he had followed the board he would have understood it even before the keys. Here it is also a matter of railway education, the eye falls on change, changes are the fear and terror of all railwaymen”.

Referring to the handling of the situation by the driver of the passenger train, the CEO of OSE, having previously characterized him General Traffic Regulation as the ultimate tool, he emphasized that “According to the Regulation, if the driver finds that he is going on a track that he is not authorized to, he must stop the train and contact the station master”.

According to Mr. Terezakis, from the conversations between the station master and the train driver, it appears that the latter, when he realized that he was going backwards, asked: “Where we said 62 goes” instead of adding “the magic word: it leads me to the descent line”. As Mr. Terezakis said, “the station master would have woken up, unfortunately he was never heard from”.

Mr. Terezakis he did not hide his emotion for the victims of the accident, and he emotionally charged a fatal railway accident, when he was 9 years old, from which only he and his family escaped. “From then on I made it my life’s goal to never let something like this happen again, that’s why I dedicated my life to the railway” she said tearfully.

Despite the intense pressure he received from the SYRIZA MP, Mr. Kokkalis, Mr. Terezakis insisted that remote control does not qualify as a safety facility and that the absolute tool for the movement of trains is the GKK. At the same time he argued that even with the installation of advanced technical systems, the outcome would likely have been the same if the station master had done the same manipulations, meaning that ETCS systems are excluded.