Report on the causes of the Tempi railway collision presented at ESIEA building in Athens

23:32 27/2/2025 - Πηγή: iEfimerida

The Hellenic Aviation and Railway Safety Investigation Agency (HARSIA) on Thursday presented its report on the tragic rail accident at Tempi in February 2023, at the headquarters of the Athens Journalists' Union ESIEA.

The 180-page report was presented by HARSIA President

Christos Papadimitriou, the head of the HARSIA investigations unit Kostas Kapetanidis, and the head of the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) Safety and Operations Unit, Bart Accou, and ERA Project Officer Fabrizio Carpinelli.

The press conference began with a minute's silence in the memory of the 57 victims of the accident, while Papadimitriou said that HARSIA aimed to show the stupidity, criminal mistakes and omissions that led to it over the years. He also spoke of a need to immediately "make the site sacred" immediately after the accident so that there could be access to vital information for the investigation.

The presentation focused on the causes that led to the tragedy and related to safety issues, human responsibilities and chronic weaknesses of the railway due to a lack of both funds and human resources. It was noted that, based on the observations, there was no indication that the technical equipment of the trains involved caused the massive fireball after the crash, a fact that leads the committee to a further investigation at universities in Greece and abroad regarding the presence of an unidentified substance.

The report concluded that the accident was the result of the fact that the two trains were moving in opposite directions on the same track between the Larisa and Neous Porous stations. It found that the station master on duty that night had become confused and made a mistake when manually setting the passenger train's course. It said that the station master's decisions and actions were partly due to a "difficult operational framework" that he had to deal with on that night and noted that he was not sufficiently experienced to use the more automated remote management system, while there were no clear written instructions and that the normal workload was greatly increased due to a series of additional factors, including a series of both permanent and temporary technical faults that created additional work or made his work harder.

The investigators also noted an unprecedented volume of communications he had to deal with, the bad design of the work space, which did not permit simultaneous communication and monitoring of the trains, his poor mental state due to a previous error that he had made and the lack of any confirmation of the order he gave to depart from the IC-62 passenger train drivers.

They pointed out that the methodology used in Greek rules is outdated relative to international standards, while the use of an open radio-communication channel does not allow immediate and uninterrupted safety communication between station masters and drivers.

Regarding the failure of the drivers to question the fact that they were travelling along the line in the wrong direction, the investigators found that this was a not uncommon occurrence on that line.

Among underlying factors responsible for the accident the investigators identified the economic crises that resulted in bad maintenance of the railway infrastructure and a structural lack of staff, from which the railway had not yet recovered in 2023. They said that maintenance actions were taken only after crucial elements failed, while the way in which Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) managed the abilities of the station masters did not guarantee that they were, in fact, capable of the safety-related tasks they were assigned responsibility for, while their performance was not systematically monitored. It was found that the equipment used, the work demanded, the available work space and general organisational measures served to push the operational personnel beyond the limits of what was humanly sustainable.

They also found that Hellenic Train was unable to demonstrate that it provided continuous training to its drivers, especially in safety-related communications and non-technical skills, nor had any process in place for systematically monitoring their performance in this area.

Investigators further criticised the limitations of the internal investigations carried out into accidents and incidents on the railway, saying their focus on frontline staff and adherence to rules prevented the introduction of sustainable changes and restricted the potential to learn from them.

Regarding the huge fireball, which went on to cause secondary fires, the report said the existing evidence made it impossible to determine what caused this but that simulations and expert reports indicate the possible presence of an as-yet unknown fuel.

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