Larissa, Greece – Family of these killed in Greece’s worst-ever prepare accident stood in silence on the Larissa Normal Hospital amphitheatre, usually used for medical doctors’ seminars.

As they listened to the deputy well being minister inform them how they have been to offer DNA samples that will be used to match the DNA of physique components recovered from the crash scene, they didn’t communicate, and barely registered facial expressions. They walked silently in small teams as their names have been known as.

Most have been {couples} of their 40s and 50s – maybe the dad and mom of the various registered lacking youngsters.

One lady held her head in her arms and stared blankly forward.

That so lots of the 57 confirmed useless and 56 lacking within the February 28 catastrophe have been younger has touched a nerve with Greeks.

Some victims had been returning to their universities after an extended weekend celebrating Greek Orthodox lent.

Twin sisters Thomi and Chrysa Plakia, 20, and their first cousin, 19-year-old Anastasia Plakia, have been returning to their college research in Thessaloniki when their prepare, the InterCity 62, slammed into an oncoming freight prepare at an estimated mixed pace of 280km/h. All three ladies have been killed.

Their hometown of Kastraki was steeped in mourning, mentioned restauranteur Eleftheria Polyzou.

“We go one another on the road. Our eyes meet, and no one is aware of what to say,” she mentioned.

Sorrow has spilled over into rage on this society, the place nuclear household bonds are nothing in need of sacred.

The Larissa stationmaster has confessed to sending prepare 62 north on the southbound observe, however many Greeks don’t consider he was the one one guilty.

“It’s not simply the stationmaster, it’s not simply his human error of not switching the tracks, it’s every little thing that occurred for 20 years earlier than that,” mentioned Andreas Samartzis, a Larissa restauranteur.

“Whenever you’re a father, you are feeling every little thing twice as intensely as others. I don’t know what I’d do if my youngsters had been concerned.”

For days, folks have watched tv photos of cranes lifting wreckage off the tracks.

The passenger prepare’s engine and the primary two vehicles have been so totally destroyed, they have been being hoisted away in mangled strips of metal.

Victims in these vehicles won’t even afford the authorities DNA samples to work with, as their stays burned in a hearth so highly effective that it melted steel.

Solely the third automotive, poised midway off the observe, was recognisable as rolling inventory.

The stationmaster, Vasilis Samaras, might face expenses of negligent manslaughter and the federal government has arrange a three-man committee of inquiry into the causes of the accident.

However some consider Samaras is getting used as a handy scapegoat.

“They’ve targeted on one tree, and have moved the forest away,” mentioned a taxi driver from Athens, Kyriakos Dellis, referring to officers who left the Greek railway system with out automated security programs.

“What we want is just not an inquiry however a folks’s court docket, proper right here in Syntagma Sq.. We’ve acquired good prosecutors and good attorneys.”

Yet one more Hellenic Railways Organisation official has been suspended. Dimitris Nikolaou, the regional security inspector, is being investigated for scheduling Samaras to work that night time.

However the chain of accountability goes additional, says Panayotis Paraskevopoulos, a just lately retired union chief of the Hellenic Railways Organisation.

There have been alleged to be three stationmasters current at Larissa when prepare 62 departed, he advised Al Jazeera.

“When [Samaras] confirmed up at 10pm to start out his shift, the opposite two left. They have been scheduled to remain till 11pm,” he mentioned.

Practice 62 departed at 11:05pm on the northbound observe, however about 100 metres out of the station it was switched to the southbound observe. That’s as a result of Samaras had earlier switched a southbound prepare throughout the northbound tracks to the Larissa prepare sheds and forgotten to set the switches straight once more, in accordance with leaked variations of his confession to the Larissa police.

“The stationmaster thought he had introduced [the switches] again into the straight place. He didn’t realise what had occurred when the prepare left, not even when the accident occurred,” mentioned Paraskevopoulos.

Samaras would solely have been capable of see prepare 62’s misguided trajectory on his switchboard “for seconds” after it left the station, mentioned Paraskevopoulos. He might simply have missed it if he had not been paying consideration. Nobody else in Greece had any image of what prepare 62 was doing.

The 2 prepare drivers and 4 different personnel on board prepare 62 also needs to have realised the error, mentioned Paraskevopoulos.

“They noticed that the prepare was switched to the southbound observe. They have been obliged to name the stationmaster and ask why they have been being switched to the oncoming path.”

Paraskevopoulos says he doesn’t perceive why they failed to take action.

Past the human errors lay an absence of automated telemetry, signalling and braking programs that briefly operated all through the Greek rail community till 2012. These advised stationmasters the place trains have been at any given time, flashed purple indicators to coach drivers to cease, and generally activated emergency brakes that overrode guide controls.

However “saboteurs would go and reduce the electrical energy cables, and with them, they reduce the cables for automated controls, and most of those controls went down all through the nation”, mentioned Paraskevopoulos.

Larissa went offline in 2013, and had since reverted to the voice instructions between the stationmaster and the prepare engineer used on February 28.

Greece’s financial system shrank by 1 / 4 within the post-2008 international monetary disaster. Successive governments slashed bills and did not resurrect the railway’s automated security programs.

The absence of these programs had knock-on results on security tradition, mentioned Yiorgos Dinopoulos, a developer who has constructed rail tracks for the federal government.

“These programs are poorly maintained within the Greek railway system,” Dinopoulos advised Al Jazeera. “They typically malfunction and flash purple when they need to flash inexperienced, so stationmasters and prepare drivers have discovered to disregard them and run purple lights.”

Three weeks in the past, the railway staff’ union issued a public grievance, demanding funding in personnel and automatic signalling tools, saying a serious accident was solely a matter of time. They usually weren’t the primary. Final yr, the Hellenic Railways Organisation’s chief security officer resigned over an absence of security procedures.

Greece faces an election between April and July, and a few determined choices are being floated.

Alter Ego Media, owned by a key ally of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has launched a public marketing campaign to droop all passenger rail providers for 3 months.

The observe the place the accident occurred is scheduled to be operational by March 10.