Rescuers search wreckage of Greece’s deadliest train crash
Rescuers searched late into the night Wednesday for survivors amid the mangled, burned-out wrecks of two trains that collided in northern Greece, killing at least 43 people and crumpling carriages into twisted steel knots in the country’s deadliest rail crash.
The impact just before midnight Tuesday threw some passengers into ceilings and out of windows.
“My head hit the roof of the carriage with the jolt,” Stefanos Gogakos, who was in a rear car, told state broadcaster ERT. He said windows shattered, showering riders with glass.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the collision of the passenger train and a freight train “a horrific rail accident without precedent in our country” and pledged a full, independent investigation.
He said it appeared the crash was “mainly due to a tragic human error,” but did not elaborate.
The train from Athens to Thessaloniki was carrying 350 passengers, many of them students returning from raucous Carnival celebrations. While the track is double, both trains were traveling in opposite directions on the same line near the Vale of Tempe, a river valley about 235 miles north of Athens.
Authorities arrested the stationmaster at the train’s last stop, in the city of Larissa. They did not release the man’s name or the reason for the arrest, but the stationmaster is responsible for rail traffic on that stretch of the tracks. He was due to appear before a prosecutor Thursday to be formally charged.
Transportation Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned, saying he was stepping down “as a basic indication of respect for the memory of the people who died so unfairly.”
Karamanlis said he had made “every effort” to improve a railway system that had been “in a state that doesn’t befit the 21st century.”
The union representing train workers announced a 24-hour strike for Thursday to protest what it said was chronic neglect of Greece’s railways by successive governments.
“It’s unlikely there will be survivors, but hope dies last,” rescuer Nikos Zygouris said.
Eight rail employees were among the dead, including the two drivers of the freight train and the two drivers of the passenger train, according to Yannis Nitsas, president of the Greek Railroad Workers Union.
“Temperatures reached [2,372 degrees Fahrenheit[, which makes it even more difficult to identify the people who were in it,” fire-service spokesperson Vassilis Varthakoyiannis said.
A man who was trying to find his daughter, who was on the train, said he had a harrowing phone conversation with her before she was cut off.
“She told me, ‘We’re on fire. … My hair is burning,’ ” he told ERT, without giving his name.