Thessaloniki Metro

Workers on the Thessaloniki metro stand in front of a freshly delivered car during an "unveiling" of the northern port city's new subway system on Thursday. The metro is not set to be finished until late 2020, prompting scorn from the political opposition Thursday. "They inaugurated four cars without a station...

The first four railcars to be used in the new Thessaloniki metro system arrived in Greece's northern port city on Wednesday.
The railcars were transported by truck from Hitachi Rail Italy's manufacturing plant in Reggio Calabria, southern Italy.
They will be assembled and positioned on the tracks, before being unveiled on Thursday.

Construction commenced Friday on the second tunnel of the Thessaloniki metro's extension to the suburb of Kalamaria. This stretch of the subway system, which is still under construction after years of delays, will have five stops.

A tunnel drill dubbed Elli is expected to break ground at the Nea Krini station on Monday as work continues on the much-beleaguered construction of the Thessaloniki metro, the head of the company responsible for the project, Attiko Metro SA, has said.

A worker at a construction site for the Thessaloniki metro was killed on Monday afternoon after the crane he was operating overturned and fell into an underground excavation area.

According to local reports, the worker, whose identity was not immediately disclosed, was aged around 50.

The accident took place at a metro construction site in the Kalamaria area of Thessaloniki.

The Economy Ministry has drafted its final list of 275 projects that remained incomplete after the end of the previous funding period in December 2015 and will be transferred to the current period (2014-20), absorbing 3.4 billion euros of European Union subsidies.

Their total budget comes to 5.1 billion euros, and the expenditure from the previous period reached 1.7 billion.

Long-delayed construction of the Thessaloniki metro came to a halt on the weekend after a building in the Voulgari district receded some 50 centimeters into the ground above a tunnel, local media reported on Tuesday.

Transport and Infrastructure Minister Christos Spirtzis has announced that the first test runs for the Thessaloniki metro will begin in 2019 and that the project will be completed by 2020.

Speaking at the Thessaloniki International Fair over the weekend, Spirtzis also said that new tenders will be launched for the metro's extension to the west of the city and to the airport.

Transport Minister Christos Spirtzis told Praktorio 104.9 FM that works for the Thessaloniki metro that had been interrupted will resume in the first ten days of 2016.

“We estimate that the works will resume in the first ten days of January, 2016,” he said.

The troubled project to construct a metro system in Thessaloniki, which is already several years behind schedule, could be set for another blow as the consortium building the underground transport system on Wednesday asked for its contract to be torn up.