Each day several million people rely on railway transport for moving from home to work, or from home to school. It is a service that has always represented, for every railway company, the most difficult challenge to face.
Demand is concentrated in very few hours and, especially in metropolitan areas, trains all converge in a small number of stations and any tiny, unexpected occurrence risks putting the whole system out of joint. Today, passengers are not willing to forgive anything; they expect their journeys to be carried out with comfortable, punctual transport, and are ready to make their complaints heard on information media. Ever since Trenitalia, the company that manages transport, has operated as a “SpA” (stock corporation) within the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane Group (since 2000), it has been organized into three divisions: Long Distance Passengers, Regional Passengers and Cargo. The Regional Passenger Division guarantees mobility services in the metropolitan, regional and interregional context and supplies over 190 million trains/km per year. It has started up a thorough renewal of its vehicle fleet, with the purchase, within the space of a couple of years, of over 200 new trains and the revamping of more than 1200 carriages. This renewal operation also extends to a new livery and a new corporate image. The latest arrivals in the fleet are the ETR425, christened with the trade name “Jazz”, built by Alstom starting from the Coradia Meridian trains platform, and the ATR 220 from the Polish Pesa firm, which commuters will know by the name of “Swing”.
The engineer Orazio Iacono, previously Network Sales Manager of RFI (Rete Ferroviaria Italiana – Italian Railway Network) was appointed to head the Regional Passenger Division in November 2014. We asked him to tell us how this complex machine works and what plans have been launched to further improve the service offered daily to millions of Italians.
Mr. Iacono, managing the Trenitalia Regional Passenger Division is a heavy task. How many trains do you put on the tracks each day and how many passengers use them?
Every day 8500 trains provide commuter services on RFI lines and are therefore part of the regional business. These 8500 trains are used daily by our commuters, who number over 2,300,000. Local transport is the most important matter we are dealing with at the moment, both as the parent company, i.e. Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane (Italian State Railways), and as Trenitalia, the railway company which heads this Division. We all think it is essential to tackle the subject of commuters in our country. This is what we are working on, with a set of initiatives concerning investments in the fleet, service contracts and also our organization. Added to this are some special projects regarding new services created for the customer.
Franco Tanel
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