Floods put Greece underwater, Piraeus stranded from rail services

Greece is experiencing one of the worst floods in its modern history, with storm ‘Daniel’ putting several parts of the country underwater and with people dead and missing. The already fragile Greek railway network is also heavily impacted since parts of the infrastructure have been destroyed. With no specific action and restoration plan in place, the damages could leave the port of Piraeus without train connections to Europe for at least a week.

The biblical floods have primarily impacted central Greece, specifically areas within the plain of Thessaly, with parts of cities and whole villages currently underwater. Indicatively, in certain places, water levels have reached a depth level of four metres.

These are the areas where most of the railway network damages have occurred. Specifically, the track between Lianokladi and Larisa, part of the county’s central north-south railway axis, has been completely impaired with damages affecting electric traction infrastructure, destroying tracks or covering them with water, mud and other portable materials.

Hellenic Train has communicated that passenger services will be substituted by buses; however, it has not yet clarified whether there has been any impact assessment or when the network will be fully operational again, with most information about the damages sourced by locals and eyewitnesses.

No trains for Piraeus

With the current status and the central railway axis impaired, logistics will also be affected heavily. In fact, the port of Piraeus and COSCO will remain without railway connections for the time being. According to experts, the damages could take at least a week before being repaired, while cleaning the tracks could take even more, considering that the storm started phasing out just yesterday and high flood water levels have not started receding yet.

Even if train services were to be substituted by road services towards the Balkans and Central Europe, such a solution is questionable considering that road infrastructure in Central Greece is also heavily damaged and parts of the highways are underwater.