2023/03/07 Wu Zonglin
Editor’s note: The serious traffic accident of a train colliding in Greece on February 28 caused the whole country to question the long-delayed railway safety reform. Still can’t save the chaotic and outdated rail system. The ineffective upgrade of Greek railways has been a long-term problem. In addition, the Greek government split up the state-owned railway company and implemented privatization in 2017 in order to obtain EU aid. The large-scale layoffs made the safety problem of Greek railways worse.
The author of this article, Wu Zonglin, used two series of articles to examine how and why Greece’s railway reform was delayed.EuropeCould one of the most serious traffic accidents in recent years have been avoided? Will the occurrence of the accident finally arouse the determination and implementation of reform?
In fact, the Greek railway safety upgrade has been planned more than ten years ago, and the specific content mainly refers to the installationEuropean train control system(the European Train Control System, ETCS). ETCS mainly operates on two subsystems, one is the equipment installed on the railway track, including the equipment that provides route informationradio transmitter(Euro-balise), including devices such as train position detection, sign machine linkage, and slope monitoring; the other is equipment installed on the train, including wireless signal receiving devices and connecting power control andbrake systemrelated parts.
▌Previous Summary:
With the automatic system of ETCS, before the train speeds up, enters the wrong zone, the system will send a warning to the driver through the wireless signal, and automatically slow down or stop the train, and even turn off the radio on the car. The signaling system automatically connects to neighboringsign machineposition to avoid remaining trains continuing into the section.
▌Security system upgrades that have been delayed until now
On the road to railway safety reform in Greece, in fact, as early as 2006, the European Union had approved a procurement proposal to provide Greece with ETCS system construction. The content was to install ETCS on Greek trains with “1 class train system”, and by the GreekERGOSE Company(Hellenic State RailwaysORThe overall management of the subsidiary) is expected to be completed in 2017.
The implementation of this project has been delayed for many years, and it was finally announced to be completed around the middle of 2018. However, due to the poor management of ERGOSE and the contractor, during this period, there were many problems such as system incompatibility, and some old trains might not be completely installed. The system, or a situation where part of the train system does not function correctly. The system on the train was barely able to complete the contract under the condition of patchwork, but the system on the railway line was not so lucky.
The “Level 1 Route System” installed at the track end was implemented by another contractor with a budget of 38 million euros in 2007, but there were also delays due to the contractor’s immature technical capabilities for ETCS, plus The subcontracting of the project had the problem of inconsistency between the materials and the content of the contract, and the contractor believed that the old system might not be upgraded, and required a complete dismantling and installation of a new system, which caused a dispute with ERGOSE.
The dispute went to court. The court believed that ERGOSE had flaws in the content of the opening bid and the formulation of technical specifications, and it was fined several times. The original deadline for the completion of the contract in 2017 was also postponed to 2020. During the period, additional budgets continued. However, due to various Due to an unknown problem, the ETCS route system of the Greek Railways is still not in use until today.
Ten years later (2017) the European Union announced Greece’sRailway Safety System Upgrade Program(The Greek National Implementation Plan, NIP) implementation status, which includes an additional budget of 117 million US dollars dedicated to upgrading the “Athens-Thessaloniki” route, but according toEuropean Union informationIt shows that the upgrade progress of Greece’s security system is almost zero, and mentions that “the Greek railway network has never had a modern automatic train protection system”.
▌Large-scale abolition of railway manpower and the working mode of “indigenous steelmaking”
In the same year, in order to meet the requirements of the European Union Bank’s rescue plan, the Greek government split and privatized the operation department of the state-owned OSE Train Company, which was originally responsible for the overall operation of the railway, and sold it to Italy’sFerrovie dello Stato Italianerenamed following the acquisition by ItalyHellenic Trainis only responsible for the operations of passenger and freight, personnel management, etc., and the basic equipment such as tracks, land, and trains are still in the charge of OSE controlled by the Greek government.
The Greek government has spent more than ten years and tens of millions of euros to install automation systems that cannot function, and even dismantle some existing devices because of compatibility issues, making the Greek railways in a state of no automation equipment, It continues to operate without even the general driving equipment.
At the same time, in order to blindly comply with the trend of “separation of vehicles and roads” and to achieve an “efficient management model”, the result was that the new operating company laid off more employees in order to make up for the expenses of renting land and driving equipment from the Greek government. “To conform to the logic of cost-benefit”, and in a severely bad hardware environment that has no power to improve, employees are allowed to manually handle the daily driving work in the “indigenous steelmaking” without training standards.
In the Tempe train collision accident, there is also the background of the Greek Railways streamlining manpower. According to Greek media reports, although the accused station master has worked for the Greek Railways for a long time, he was originally a porter. Called to reduce the number of employees of state-owned enterprises and was transferred to the office of the Ministry of Education. The 59-year-old veteran employee will be transferred back to the railway company once more until mid-2022 and will receive a 5-month station master training course.
According to the webmaster’s own Facebook post, he was dispatched to Larissa on January 23 following completing training. However, according to Greek media reports, he had been rotating trainees at different stations for a month before the February 28 accident. In other words, when this “rookie station master” actually went to Larissa station to report for duty, he had no chance to familiarize himself with the local driving business at all.
Yiannis Nitsas, chairman of the Greek railway union, said in an interview with the local TV station “Skai TV” that the marking machine at the accident site has been in a state of failure for a long time, and there are signs that some technical problems occurred earlier on the day of the accident. problem, causing parts of the route to sometimes be temporarily blocked, which in turn complicates human judgment of available routes.
In 2019, Europe hadMedia articleDiscussing the poor implementation of Greece’s railway safety budget allocated by the European Union, Kostas Genidounias, chairman of the Greek Train Staff Association, described the overall situation in an interview:
“During the entire route, we have been shuttling back and forth on the railway tracks without markers. More than 80% of the markers are often out of order or display red lights. Only the airport line between Athens Airport and Archaons has Well-maintained electronic management systems and marking machines. That is to say, at present, only regarding 30 kilometers of the entire Greek railway network (regarding 2,250 kilometers in total) have functioning signaling systems.”
So far we have a clearer understanding of the structure of the accident:
The long-term invalid and unreliable driving equipment (including sign machines, on-board equipment, etc.) makes the daily operation of the Greek railways have to rely on the almost entirely manual primitive way to transmit messages and control the speed and route of trains. The sign machine and other electronic devices that only make half a set of “interference” are the way to continue daily driving.
The station master of Larissa and the driver of the intercity train almost did not hesitate to let the train cross the red light and continue driving. It is once morest this background that the professional culture was created. In the end, when neither the on-board equipment nor the ground equipment might forcibly stop the train that violated the blocking principle, and the train supervisor made a mistake in his judgment, it seemed that something that might have been foreseen and the last thing he wanted to see happened just like that.
After the accident, the heads of the Greek Railways (OSE) and its subsidiary ERGOSE submitted their resignations one following another. Hellenic Train, which is responsible for operating the route, also announced a short-term suspension of operations to coordinate with the inspection of route safety. The Prime Minister of GreeceMitsotakis(Kyriakos Mitsotakis) met relatives of the dead and missing during his visit to Larissa hospital, “They asked me ‘why?’… I think we owe the families an honest answer” he said.
▌After the event: the eternal return of tragedy?
Angry crowds gathered outside the Athens headquarters of the Greek Railways on the evening of March 1, and there were also demonstrations in Thessaloniki and Larissa, a city near the accident site. The angry crowd began to throw stones at the headquarters building, and the demonstrations gradually escalated into violent clashes. The police briefly forcibly dispersed the crowd, but angry people continued to take to the streets to express their dissatisfaction in the past few days, because they believed that the tragedy It might have been avoided.
In fact, the Greek government does not have the opportunity to hear suggestions. In 2022, a relevant official of the Ministry of Transport resigned to express his protest and dissatisfaction with the “inexplicable delay in the upgrade of the safety system”. In the same year, the European Union Transport Agency sued the Greek government to the European Court of Justice , because the Greek government refuses to disclose the implementation contract related to the upgrade of the traffic safety system, making the related projects unable to be supervised and investigated in an open and transparent manner.
“It’s not a mistake, it’s a crime,” headlined the Greek newspaper Syntaktwn, reporting that the railway union has long warned of the inherent risks of the rail system.
The Greek Railway Union launched a 24-hour strike on the evening of March 2 to protest the government’s long-term neglect of the aging railway system, insufficient manpower and training. The Athens Metro Union also responded to the 24-hour strike but later announced that it was “unwilling to be considered a consumer Accident casualties” to temporarily cancel the strike. Nisas, president of the Greek railway union, said the safety gaps on the Athens-Thessaloniki route had been known for years and they had warned repeatedly.
At the beginning of February, Kostas Kar, a cadre of the railway union, wrote an open letter to the top government officials. In the letter, he wrote:“Are we going to wait until the coming accident to see them shed crocodile tears? When are they going to start getting involved in this?”Now the letter looks like a prophetic hit.
Classical Greece, with its tragic philosophy as its root, gave birth to Western civilization for thousands of years. In recent years, the patterns of major railway accidents around the world are like scripts written by the same author: Railway operators reduce manpower and reduce equipment maintenance budgets in order to save costs; long-term high-intensity labor exploitation forces railway workers to go on strike This approach is to try to remind the government and the world that labor rights and railway safety are being violated; then the focus of railway safety is blurred in the public opinion disputes over the strike, and a short-lived calm is ushered in by the improvement measures that treat the symptoms but not the root cause.
In the end, an unfortunate accident happened, which took away the lives of dear family members and paid a huge social cost. The angry people demanded that the government and railway organizations take responsibility, and the government and the consortium hurriedly compiled the budget and made a declarative statement. Policies, but infrastructure work that requires a lot of money but hardly makes headlines is still neglected, and railway safety reform is still in a vicious circle.
This set of scripts has been thrillingly staged in the United States, Britain, Germany, etc., and now it is also repeated in Greece. Can the story of the railway accident be rewritten one day?
Responsible editor / Lai Yun
