Greece's main railways were built to carry people and goods between cities. The industrial lines were a different breed entirely. Each served a single owner, a mine or a factory, and went nowhere else. They threaded chromium mines at Eretria, marble quarries at Dionyssos, nickel works at Larymna, and the great lignite basins that powered the country's electricity. Some were laid only for a few years to build a public work and then torn up; the line at Heraklion in Crete existed solely to construct the port between 1922 and 1934, then disappeared. Most ran on metre or narrow gauge, small and cheap, because hauling coal a short distance never needed the heavy engineering of a national network.

The most extensive of these networks served the power station at Aliveri on Euboea. Built by the Public Power Corporation in 1958 on the bones of an earlier system, the metre-gauge line stretched twenty-two kilometers, carrying lignite from underground mines inland down to a seaside plant that drew cooling water straight from the Aegean. Five Jung steam locomotives worked it first, replaced around 1980 by Japanese-built Nippon Sharyo and German Diema diesels. Deeper inside the mines, an electrified Decauville system ran on three pairs of small AEG locomotives until 1970, when the tunnels flooded and the work moved to the surface. The whole network shut down in 1988, when the plant switched to fuel oil and the mines closed for good.

Far to the northwest, around Ptolemais, lignite did not just support the economy; it was the economy. Fertilizer plants, power stations, and the LIPTOL works that dried brown coal into dust and briquettes all clustered around the open fields. A dedicated mining railway linked the Northern and Western lignite fields to the factories, worked by twelve German-built Bo-Bo electric locomotives and four shunters. Their end came not from exhaustion alone but from a quieter machine. As the old fields ran out, the new ones were served by conveyor belts, endless rubber rivers that never tired, never derailed, and never needed a driver. One by one the rail lines were lifted, and the locomotives fell silent.

Industrial machinery rarely earns a second life, but a few of these engines did. One of the Nippon Sharyo diesels from Aliveri survives in excellent condition and still runs at Velestino, just west of Volos, where the preservation society EMOS keeps it working on an abandoned stretch of the old Thessaly Railways. The Tsalapatas locomotive rests in its museum in Volos itself, a reminder of when the city's chimneys burned and its kilns roared. These survivors matter precisely because they were never glamorous. They are the working machines of ordinary industry, saved by people who understood that the history of a place is written not only in its temples and battles but in the trains that hauled its coal.