Vangelis Mitrousias, a journalist for ERT, who has been at the scene of the collision of the two trains in Tempi since the first minute, has secured an exclusive video revealing the moment of the collision.
Shocking CCTV footage has revealed the moment two trains collided in Greece in a horror smash that killed at least 43 people in the country's worst rail tragedy.Â
Two carriages were crushed, and a third engulfed in fires as hot as 1300 degrees C when a passenger train and a freight train smashed into each other head-on late Tuesday near the central city of Larissa, on a route plagued by years of safety warnings.
The security camera clip showed a huge fireball rising hundreds of feet into the air immediately following the brutal impact, sparking the blaze that reduced two carriages to smouldering wreckage.Â
The head-on collision of two trains when a passenger train was on the route between Athens and Thessaloniki, with 342 passengers and ten staff collided with a freight train on which two people were on board on the route from Thessaloniki to Athens.
The trains were on the same line when the passenger train was estimated to be running at 166 km for 25 kilometres without the driver knowing that a train was coming from the opposite direction.
A station master on duty during Greece's deadliest train accident will testify Thursday in the central city of Larissa over the disaster that claimed dozens of lives, plunging the country into mourning.
The 59-year-old will appear before a prosecutor to explain how a passenger train with over 350 people on board was allowed to run on the same line as a freight train for several kilometres.
