Many of the passengers had to kick through windows to escape the flames. Temperatures in one carriage rose to 1,300 Celsius after it caught fire, authorities said.
To identify some of the victims, relatives had to give DNA samples at a hospital in Larissa.
In a televised address on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who had earlier visited the site of the crash, said that evidence pointed to a human error.
Government spokesman Giannis Oikonomou was expected to update the media at around midday on Thursday.
Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis had earlier resigned saying he was taking responsibility for the state’s long-standing failures to fix a railway system he said “was not fit for the 21st century”.
Nikos Tsouridis, a retired train driver trainer, said drivers involved in the crash had died “because there were no safety measures”.
“And why were there no safety measures? The station master made a mistake, he acknowledged it, but surely there should be a safety mechanism to fall back on,” he said.
Greece sold railway operator TRAINOSE under its international bailout programme in 2017 to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, expecting hundreds of millions of euros to be invested in rail infrastructure in the coming years.
The Italian operation has responsibility for passenger and freight, and the Greek state-controlled OSE for infrastructure.
Source: CNA
