2004: The Opening of a Tram System in Greece

July 19, 2004  

An inaugural ceremony was held for the first section of the current tram (streetcar) system serving Greece’s capital city of Athens and several nearby municipalities. The original version of this region’s tram system had been launched in 1882 with horse-driven vehicles. This system, which was electrified in 1908, remained in operation until being discontinued in 1960 and replaced with motorbuses and trolleybuses.

The formal Monday morning debut of the present-day version of that transit service in the Athens metropolitan area took place at the station in the municipality of Elliniko (part of the municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli since 2011). Those on hand for the grand opening of Athens Tram included Michalis Liapis, who had become Greece’s ministry of transport and communications in March of that year and remained in the position until September 2007.

The Elliniko station was one of 49 stations that first went into service when Athens Tram opened. (One of those other stations, Fix station in the southern section of Athens, is pictured in the above photo taken in March 2023.) Just a few weeks after this system was inaugurated, it became a part of the region’s overall transportation network that accommodated people traveling to and from the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Athens Tram now encompasses 59 stations altogether and a total of 20.1 miles (32.4 kilometers). Since 2011, this system has been owned and operated by the Athens-based Urban Rail Transport S.A. (STASY).

Photo Credit: Argybz (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)

For more information on Urban Rail Transport S.A. (STASY), please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STASY