European Railroad Discussion > A question about OSE traffic and power in Greece

I looked up the OSE roster in Greece and was surprised to see that there doesn't seem to be a lot of freight power. I come across pictures of the 30 or so old MLW's (Mx-627and Mx-636) and figured they might be on secondary services or on their way out. But then if I search for "OSE freight train" and watch videos or look at pictures, seemingly every train has a pair of them for power, and I see little else used to power freight trains. Wikipedia notes that of the 30, only 21 are in service, though I realize that figure could be out of date.

My question is... whether 21 or 30, how is that enough power for the whole freight network? Is traffic really that scarce?

The latest statistics I could find were for 2016 and in that year OSE moved just 4.5 million
tons of freight, a very low total.  If you divide that by 365 you come up with just 12,300 tons
moved daily in the entire country.  That may explain why so few units are needed to move
what little traffic there is.

We all know that Greece suffered a catastrophic economic collapse a decade or so ago and the
recovery has been quite slow.

Thanks for the context. I thought of the economic crisis and all of the cuts... but was still surprised, as some videos seemed like someone in one location shooting several freights on the same day, but if you added up the engine numbers it was like they say half of the fleet!

I last visited Greece in the 90's when the Alco's still operated the narrow guage lines on the Pelleponese. There were hundreds of redundant freight cars stored then at Thessaloniki, but some eveidence of freight traffic then. I reckon it has more or less disappeared from the OSE network following major cutbacks after the financial crisis, as alluded to in the earlier post.

That's just one average train on BNSF or UP.