A suburban train (Proastiakos) on a short route headed from the Athens airport to the west Attica Ano Liosia station reportedly ignored a red railway signal on Saturday afternoon, an incident that immediately raised alarm bells given that it came a little more than a year after the deadly Tempi rail collision.
An extraordinary meeting followed at the relevant transport ministry on Monday between ministry officials, the leadership of the state-run Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) and Hellenic Train, the Italian State Railways subsidiary that operates the vast amount of train routes in Greece.
The incident involving train 2235 is reportedly the latest in a series of similar mishaps, with the most serious recorded last December at the Acharnes station.
The February 2023 Tempi rail disaster claimed the lives of 57 people when two trains collided, the result of human error but also of decades of purported mismanagement in the state’s railroad monopoly. The latter resulted in the absence or patchy operation of electronic and manual fail-safe and backup systems.
