Greece

[WatcherZero]

Greek railway operator OSE will suspend all international train services from Sunday to Greece's neighbours Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey, a spokesman for OSE's train operations subsidiary Trainose said on Saturday. 'They are costly services and didnt attract the passengers to keep them going'. The cuts will affect trains to Skopje and Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul and Bucharest. Trainose's parent company, OSE, is one of the most heavily indebted Greek state organisations and currently owes more than 10 billion euros ($14 billion). Its part of a broader strategy to return the company to profitability which will see rising fares, reduced services and trains to the southern Peloponnese peninsula have been "almost completely eliminated."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20110212/tbs-ailing-greek-state-rail-to-halt-inte-5268574.html

 

[route101]

Sad news I took the train from Skopje to Thessaloniki last June and there was only one OSE carriage so is the rest of the train still running with Serbian / Hungarian Carriages?

 

[reb0118]

Sad news I took the train from Skopje to Thessaloniki last June and there was only one OSE carriage so is the rest of the train still running with Serbian / Hungarian Carriages?

I think not as the locos & drivers will change at the border. CH/OSE will provide them on the Greek side and will therefore in all likelyhood have withdrawn them.

 

[Railjet]

Sad news I took the train from Skopje to Thessaloniki last June and there was only one OSE carriage so is the rest of the train still running with Serbian / Hungarian Carriages?

Apparently not. The trains are not going past Gevgelija just before the Greek border, even though it is only about 50 miles from Thessaloniki.

 

[route101]

Great for anyone wanting to go from Macedonia to Greece as there is very few links .

 

[reb0118]

Great for anyone wanting to go from Macedonia to Greece as there is very few links .

Watch out for the robbin' bar stewards at the Macedonian border. They took a 10€ tax of every one on our coach.

 

[route101]

Watch out for the robbin' bar stewards at the Macedonian border. They took a 10€ tax of every one on our coach.

Never had a problem , passport never got stamped and Greece never looked at it.

 

[fisherman]

Hello from Greece!

Unfortunately, the news are not good. Traffic on almost all of the regional network has been suspended since late January. All lines in Peloponnesos have stopped operating (except from the suburban line of Patras and the Katakolo-Pyrgos-Olympia line). In northern Greece the lines Amyntaio-Kozani and Florina-Edessa have ceased their operation. The most other lines have few trains per day and they can't serve the local population.

Recently a major part of the peripheral network was renovated and now after millions of euros have been spent these lines have close. The government claims that the trains had few passengers. That's a lie, Florina-Edessa line carried 150,000+ passengers/year and had occupancy 70%+. The local lines in Peloponnesos were also very successful. The local line between Kalamata and Messini in its heyday, 2 years ago, carried around 700-800 passengers/day. Also the line Korinthos-Nauplio/Tripoli opened in 2009 with no advertisement. How can someone expect passengers when no one knows about them?

Some pictures from Kalamata depot with abandoned trains have been circulated in other railway forums. The MAN-1 (red-blue) and MAN-4 (red-white) trainsets are 20 years old and the Stadler GTWs only 6-7 years old. Out of 12 GTWs only five are operational. The MAN-1 and MAN-4 trainsets have been transported to Ag. Anargiroi depot near Athens and nowadays are been carried to Piraeus to be stored, here you can find an article in greek about them.

In winter a new law was passed about lines with no traffic. According to the law, railway tracks that have been out of service for one year will be categorized as abandoned lines and they can be destroyed or sold.

There have been no measures taken to help reverse the bad economic situation of Trenose, lines just close which leads to even lower revenue.

You can find a map of the network before these changes here. :cry: