Tempi accident report exposes Greek railway safety failures

GREECE: Rail and air accident investigation body EODASAAM exposes serious systemic failures in the Greek railway sector and makes 17 recommendations for improvement in its report into the head-on collision between passenger and freight trains near Tempi which killed 57 people on February 28 2023.

The 178-page report published on February 27 says that the immediate cause of the collision at Evangelismos on the Athens – Thessaloniki main line was that a station master did not use an automated method to set the route for passenger train IC-62 to leave Larissa station. This would have positioned all turnouts correctly. Instead, he ordered manual operation, and forgot to place a turnout in the correct position.

The report says these actions ‘need to be understood in the difficult operational context he was confronted with’, including a series of technical failures, a control panel that ‘can certainly lead to confusion’ and poor communication practices including an open radio channel which did not allow for direct uninterrupted safety-related communications. The rail industry’s competence management was also poor.

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