The Hellenic Railways’ (OSE) traffic regulator cannot follow the movement of trains in real time; the regulator is also unable to communicate with the train conductors.
This revelation was made in October 2024, in a deposition to the magistrate examining the circumstances of the Tempe rail crash by the current regulator.
“No, there is no way to view the movement [of trains], or the traffic in a specific line, in real time,” the regulator responded to the magistrate’s specific question.
“Even today, the regulator cannot directly communicate with the conductors,” the regulator responded to the follow-up question.
The regulator was on the night shift the fateful night of February 28, 2023, when a passenger and a freight train, placed on the same track by mistake, collided head-on. In a previous deposition, in mid-May 2023, he recounted how he repeatedly questioned the stationmaster at Larissa, the city closest to the accident site, which tracks he had placed the trains on, with the stationmaster repeatedly insisting that he had correctly steered the passenger train to the northbound track. This was, of course, erroneous.
The regulator was called to provide a supplementary deposition in October 2024, where he revealed the state of train monitoring.
There is no listening to conversations between stationmasters and conductors either. In fact, the traffic regulator and his colleagues at OSE headquarters have to rely exclusively on the stationmaster’s reports on train movements and conversations with the conductors. So it was during his February 28, 2023 shift. Nothing has changed.
“We monitor the trains on a 24-hour basis on the basis of information provided to us by the stationmasters, which we cannot verify. They inform us about the trains’ real departure and arrival times from and to their station and about any problems that crop up in the network.”