Greece and its capital, Athens, have long been awash with historical sites and museums. However, no national railway museum exists in the country. All this is about to change, because a new railway museum is in the process of being set up in the capital – with a little help from volunteers including a local enthusiast who also ‘commutes’ to work one of the UK’s premier heritage lines. Jason Zorzos is one of the enthusiastic helpers who showed me around. During our conversation, he revealed that he often flies to England to work on the Great Central Railway at Loughborough, where he is a passed cleaner and also fires.
What started this nascent project was the closure of the central Athens Railway Museum in Sepolia district. The building, which housed several steam locomotives and carriages, was demolished for converting the Athens-Thessaloniki main line to underground in that area.
Normally, when a railway museum closes and relocates to a bigger and better location, especially if it’s in a historic roundhouse, there would be much publicity, pictures of the locomotives in transit, fanfares, cutting of tapes, and dignitaries cashing in on the free publicity.
Yet completely the opposite happened because
