G reece has long lagged behind West European countries in its transportation infrastructure, including roads, railways, public buses and trains. With huge injections of European Union cash, major efforts are under way to close the gaps and bring Greece up to speed.

In addition to the major works being undertaken in Athens as the city prepares to host the Olympics in 2004, the main road and rail links between Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece's two largest cities are being developed and modernized.

A major highway has been built to link Athens to Corinth, and is being extended to Patras, while the railroad on this route is being upgraded. At Patras, the Rio-Anterio bridge is being built across the Gulf of Corinth, and will eventually be linked to the Egnatia Highway at Ioannina in Epirus. Egnatia is being built to run the breadth of Greece from the Ionian Sea in the West to the Turkish border in the East.

Dimitri Fatouros, chairman of Egnatia Odos, which is building an East- West highway across Greece. Egnatia Odos photo

Christos Tsitouras, the general manager of Ergose, which is rebuilding Greece's railways. Ergose photo

These developments "will change the whole picture" of transport in Greece, says Transport and Communications Minister Christos Verelis.

In the late 70s the idea of building a highway to transverse Greece from West to East was mooted in government circles, but it was not until the EU stepped in with an offer to provide major funding for such a highway that, in 1995, a company was set up to turn the idea into a reality.

Egnatia Odos S.A. was established by the Greek government and EU to build a 680 kilometer, four-lane highway from Igoumenitsa, the main Greek port on the Ionian sea, to the Turkish border. This route would take you some 12 hours to traverse in the past, but should take little more than five hours once Egnatia is completed in 2006.

The Egnatia Highway project is a challenging engineering feat, having to pass through rugged mountains in Epirus, the region bordering Albania, and has about 85 kilometers of bridges and tunnels (an almost equal number of each).

It has been designed to avoid archeological sites, which are to be found throughout Greece, a rare Brown bear habitat, and the acoustically remarkable Dodonis Theater.

The company's chairman, Dimitri Fatouros, an architect by profession, former government minister of education and rector of the Thessaloniki University, says that some $8 million has been spent on archeological excavations, and that at least one museum will be built along the route to house relics dug up in the course of construction.

He says an extraordinary seven to eight percent of the highway's cost is incurred by accommodating environmental concerns.

Making the Brown bears happy by building an additional tunnel will add $80 million to the price tag, while a realignment of the highway to avoid any noise disturbance to the theater will add some $53 million.

The total cost is estimated at 1.1 trillion drachmas, just shy of $3 billion. Of this, some 65 percent is coming from the EU, with the rest provided by the Greek state, which has raised most of the money on credit to be paid back from toll revenues.

Of the total length, some 120 kilometers was already in place, but is being upgraded to the international standards of the new construction. By the end of this year, some 220 kilometers of new highway will be in place and by the middle of next year the section connecting Thessaloniki to the Turkish border, running the length of Thrace between the Aegean Sea and Bulgaria will be complete.

By early 2004, 450 kilometers of the highway will be ready, Fatouros says, leaving 110 kilometers of "extremely difficult technical construction" that will be completed over the next couple of years.

Egnatia will have nine perpendicular arteries linking it with neighboring countries, making it possible for Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians and Turks, as well as people further afield but still part of the Southeastern European community, to reach Greece in a few hours.

Ports and airports in the main cities along the route, Igoumenitsa, Ioannina, Thessaloniki, Kavala and Alexandropouli, will make Egnatia a backbone for trade and transport across a large northern swath of Greece, as well as the main route of access to the Aegean Sea for all of Southeast Europe.

Although rail travel is almost universal in western Europe, for most Greeks taking a train has been the last choice, something you do if you can't drive or find a seat on a public bus. The reason has been the decrepit state of the rail network in Greece, and the excessively long time it takes to get anywhere by train.

However, as part of its two last aid packages for Greece, the EU has included a total of some $5.25 billion towards the development of railroads in the country.

"We never dreamed we would receive such an amount," says Dr. Christos Tsitouras, the general manager who runs the company building railroads in Greece.

The main rail line between Athens and Thessalonki passes through difficult, mountainous country. Ergose photo

A Greek American engineer who was invited by the government to run state enterprises in his homeland, leaving behind a career in lecturing and consulting in New York, Tsitouras has headed up ERGOSE S.A. since 1996.

A subsidiary of OSE, the company that runs the trains, ERGOSE is working to create the infrastructure for Greece's railways to be raised to international standards.

EU funding covered up to 85 percent of the cost of the first rail construction projects, but the second tranche, which covers the 2000 to 2006 period, is provided against matching funds from the Greek state.

The most important rail route being developed connects Greece's two main cities, Athens and Thessaloniki. The fastest time on this 500 kilometer route by train now is 5 hours and 45 minutes, about an hour longer than it takes to drive.

But, cutting through mountainous country along the jagged Aegean coastline, the old line, which is just a single, metric track, is being expanded to two standard tracks for the full distance and being electrified.

With one difficult sector of the track not expected to be ready until 2007, when the full trip will take only 3 hours and 50 minutes, by the Olympics in 2004 the trip will be made half with electrified trains and half with the older diesel-driven trains and take 4 hours and 50 minutes.

The new tracks are designed to carry trains at 200 kilometers an hour, but on sections passing through difficult terrain train speeds will often not exceed 120 kilometers an hour, says Tsitouras.

Also to be connected to the main double-track route will be Pireaus, the port city that serves Athens, and Patras, the port from where ferries leave for Italy.

Otherwise, single-track lines along the northern Aegean from Thessaloniki through Thrace to Alexandropouli, running near Bulgaria towards the Turkish border, as well as lines from Thessaloniki towards Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will all be upgraded as single-track lines.

Tsitouras says that for the moment there are no definite plans to link Greece to other EU rail networks through the difficult Balkan terrain, but that it should only be a matter of time before such plans are formulated and construction projects set in motion, given EU policies to develop the Balkan region. He believes ERGOSE, with 350 experienced engineers, will be well placed to build railways in those countries.

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