After the horrific head-on collision of passenger and freight trains in Tempe in northern Greece, the death toll climbed to at least 43, and a railroad worker was arrested Wednesday.

The Greek government designated three days of national mourning after the country's deadliest train accident, in which more than 80 people were injured.

Greece Train Crash Cause

According to Hellenic Railway, the passenger train was heading from Athens to Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece and a renowned tourist destination known as the "gateway to the Aegean Sea."

Per USA Today, the train carried 350 passengers, including many college students returning from Carnival, a three-day celebration preceding the Religious season of Lent.

According to officials, many carriages derailed, and at least three caught fire when two trains collided at high speed shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister of Greece, vowed an impartial inquiry and stated that the disaster looked "mostly the result of a sad human error" but did not explain.

The rescue workers combed through the debris for hours, searching for the sounds of survivors. Cranes were utilized to remove layers of twisted, charred steel. Eight rail workers were killed, including the two freight train drivers and the two passenger train drivers, according to the Greek Railroad Workers Union president, Yannis Nitsas.

Several casualties were believed to be returning college students following a long holiday weekend. The death toll is expected to rise, as temperatures in one carriage reached 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,600 degrees Fahrenheit) when it caught fire.

Officials are investigating how the high-speed passenger train collided with a freight train traveling the other way on the same track at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour).

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Death Toll is Expected to Climb

Passengers recounted a "nightmarish" catastrophe that engulfed their train in flames just before midnight in the town of Larissa in northern Greece, some 320 kilometers north of Athens. It had departed the Greek capital and was en route to Thessaloniki in the north.

Others shattered windows to flee the blaze, as per Reuters. On impact, some were propelled up to 40 meters (130 feet) away. While authorities attempted to determine why the two trains had been on the same track "for several kilometers," the station master was detained, and the country's transport minister resigned.

Cranes hoisted windowless carriages as dawn rescuers combed through the smoldering, twisted mass of steel. According to Vassilis Varthakogiannis, a spokesperson for the fire department, the high temperatures in the first carriage made it challenging to identify people who were trapped inside and estimate the number of fatalities.

Thus, he argued, the death toll was sure to climb. Athens and Brussels lowered their flags to half-staff, and the Greek government designated three days of national mourning.

In subsequent speeches, he indicated that he had accepted the resignations of senior OSE and ERGOSE executives. In Athens, around one thousand individuals demonstrated in front of the headquarters of Hellenic Train, another component of the train network, where some threw stones through the glass.

Officers used teargas to disperse the crowd. Hellenic Train stated that it stopped all scheduled trains on Thursday due to a strike by railroad personnel.

Giannis Antonoglou, who escaped from the fifth compartment of the passenger train, stated that the glass abruptly shattered, and "we ended up tilted 45 degrees as if we were ready to fall over."

Stergios Minenis, a 28-year-old passenger who leaped to escape from the plane's debris, said: "The fire was immediate. As we were turning over, we were being burned.

Other passengers said that they were forced to shatter carriage windows with their bodies or bags to escape the blazing wreckage. The mayor of Larissa stated that some of the deceased could only be identified via DNA testing. A hospital in Larissa said that relatives of missing passengers had supplied DNA samples to assist in identifying remains, BBC reported.

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