Duties to stationmaster Larisa who had the night shift accident in Tempethey give train drivers talking to “K”. “This is a tragic mistake, there were two trains on the same track. I don’t know why this happened, either out of ignorance or inattention,” says a train driver who passed the same point a few hours earlier on another train.

In his statement, the chairman of the trade union of train drivers Kostas Genidunias he claimed that everything was done by hand. He said that information about the movement of trains is transmitted from the station master to the station master by radio. “The stationmaster tells us in Athens that you will go to Menidi, then to Oinoi, this is done 15 times in total from Athens to Thessaloniki,” he said.

In 2010, for a report, I traveled in the cab of a train driver from Athens to Thessaloniki. At the time, train drivers were preparing for strikes as the total number of railroad workers was expected to drop drastically through redeployment and retirement. “Can you imagine Greece without a train?” is the question they asked their posters.

Departing from Athens, we passed the line, which was looted. Scrap merchants from the heights of Menidi cut the power cables to burn them and collect the copper. In some places there were no wires at all, and in others they were so loose that they threatened to hit the windshield. “Here, the train is driven by people, not machinery,” said nontas Theodoropoulos, then president of the train drivers’ union.

“For us, any such mistake in Larisa will be fatal,” the train drivers say to “K”.

Signs of laziness

The train driver received a paper with 48 slack on our route. There were sections of the line where work was carried out for a long time or there were problems with light signaling, and the speed had to be reduced. Then, in 2010, there were no traffic lights from Piraeus to Agios Anargyros, they did not work on the Oinois – Tiforea section, and from Domoko to Thessaloniki, some were on and some were not. If they were red, it meant that the system was not working. The driver had to slow down and communicate via radio or even cell phone with the stationmaster to find out where the other train was and if the tracks were open.

One of the machinists of this route said that he knew the network and its turns well, he knew where he could speed up and where he couldn’t. We then arrived in Thessaloniki 38 minutes late.

What has changed 13 years later? The driver who spoke to “K” says that traffic lights are now working in some places, for example, on the section from Tiforei to Domoko and with minimal problems from Domoko to Larissa. But there are other sections of the network without light markings, as well as complaints from the machinists’ union about the shortcomings associated with them. “It’s like you’re driving down a road with red traffic lights and you’re being asked to drive past them,” says the train driver. “For us, any mistake like this in Larisa would be fatal,” he adds.