The first railways

The Age of the Railway was ushered in on 25 September 1825 in England, with the journey by the "steam engine" built by George Stephenson and by his son Robert. This machine, named "Locomotion", covered the 34 kilometres between Stockton and Darlington, hauling 33 wagons and a passenger coach, travelling at a speed of 20 kilometres per hour.

The first Italian State with a railway line was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The 7.25-kilometre Naples-Portici line in length was built by the french engineer Armand Bayard and was inaugurated on 3 October 1839, heralding Italy into the Railway Age.

This was soon followed by the construction of the Naples-Nocera and Castellammare line and the Caserta line inaugurated in 1843 and extended the following year as far as Capua, and the Cancello-Nola branch line. The Neapolitan railway network on 3 June 1846 totalled 94 kilometres in length.

In 1855, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies launched a plan of vast dimensions, but only the Nola-Sarno and Nocera-Vietri lines, totalling 28 kilometres, were actually built.

Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, the Milan-Monza line was inaugurated on 17 August 1840 and the construction of the Milan-Verona-Venice line was designed. When the first War of Independence broke out in 1848, the Milan-Treviglio and Vicenza-Padua-Mestre lines, totalling 100 kilometres in length, were already in operation. The Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia completed the Milan-Venice line in 1857, and in 1860 extended it as far as Trieste, which was already linked to the line to Vienna.

The Grand-Duchy of Tuscany inaugurated the Leghorn/Livorno-Pisa line on 14 March 1844 as the first section of the Leopolda line to Empoli and Florence-Porta al Prato, which was completed on 10 June 1848. By the end of 1848, with the Pisa-Lucca, Florence-Prato and Lucca-Pescia lines open, the Tuscan network exceeded 158 kilometres. In 1851 the Grand-Duchy completed the line linking Florence to Prato and Pistoia (the Maria Antonia line). The railway network was completed with the construction of the Empoli-Siena line (1849), later extended to Sinalunga and of the Pescia-Pistoia line (1859). By the end of 1860 Tuscany had 330 kilometres of track.

The Kingdom of Sardinia was the last Italian State to adopt the railway, with only the Papal States trailing behind it.

But it was thanks to the farsightedness of Cavour and Carlo Ilarione Petitti that from the very outset Piedmont had begun to build a fully-fledged rail network. The main artery of the system was the Turin-Alessandria-Genoa line, of which the first section, Turin-Moncalieri, was inaugurated on 24 September 1848. By 1855, with 460 kilometres of lines, Piedmont had more track than any other Italian State, increasing it by the end of 1860 to 860 kilometres.

The Papal States, the last to instal a railway system, inaugurated the Rome-Frascati line on 7 July 1856, and three years later opened the Rome-Civitavecchia line.

The main networks

In 1861, with the unification of Italy, the railway network was 1,732 kilometres in length, made up of numerous lines operated by 7 railway companies with no organic national plan. The newly-created Italian State gave a major impetus to implementing a programme to make up for the delays that had built up in the previous decades, keeping Italy behind the more advanced European countries and North America. Several new lines were built, bringing the network five years later up to 3,734 kilometres in length.

Enormous effort was put into building new railway lines. To push this commitment forward, the newly-founded Kingdom of Italy enacted a law in 1865 to bring all the existing railway lines and any future lines under four large companies:

Societa' Ferroviaria dell'Alta Italia (SFAI), which was given all the Northern Italian lines;
Societa' delle Strade Ferrate Romane (SFR), which took over the lines along the Ligurian coast (subsequently acquired by SFAI), Tuscany, Campagna, Umbria, Abruzzo and the former Papal State;
Societa' Italiana per le Strade Ferrate Meridionali, to operate lines in Campagna (except the Naples-Ceprano line), Molise, Abruzzo, Puglia, and the Bologna-Ancona-Bari-Otranto route;
Societa' delle Calabro-Sicule, which was given the Taranto-Brindisi, Taranto-Reggio, Metaponto-Potenza-Eboli and the Sicilian lines.
To attract private capital, and foreign investment, to the railways, Italy adopted the public franchise system of the 'concessione' which enabled the companies to earn a good return on operating the lines, and the Exchequer to amortise the costs over a long period.

But the public franchise system, under which ownership and operating responsibilities were handed over to the large railway operating companies, did not produce the desired results. In 1885 a new law was therefore enacted completely overhauling the criterion for allocating the lines and a new covenant ('convenzione') was concluded between the State and each of the three large railway companies.

This "covenant" system was based on the basic principle that the Grantees were only required to operate the railway networks, but the network itself remained the property of the State.

Strade Ferrate Meridionali was responsible for the lines down the Adriatic coast and the Rome-Florence line, as well as the lines in the Veneto and part of Lombardy, totalling 4,131 kilometres.

Società italiana per le strade ferrate del Mediterraneo (known as Rete Mediterranea-R.M.) was given 4,046 kilometres of lines partly in Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria, and the long Genoa-Rome-Naples-Salerno-Taranto line, as well as the Reggio Calabria-Taranto line around the Ionian coast.

The four largest railway stations (Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples) were jointly managed by them, and each network served major ports and was linked to the foreign railway network.

Lastly, Societa' italiana per le strade ferrate della Sicilia was given 597 kilometres of lines in Sicily. mainly comprising the Messina-Catania-Siracusa and the Catania-Caltanissetta-Palermo lines.

But even this system proved disappointing. Track and rolling stock upgrades and renewals were strictly dependent on increased revenues, but they only began to rise at the end of the century.

The Covenants were due to expire for the first time in 1905. The Grantees were unwilling to upgrade the rolling stock with their contracts about to expire, and did everything possible to keep down their operating costs and raise profits. The freezing of wages, and in some cases wage cuts, created discontent unease among their employees, while the obsolete rolling stock, which frequently broke down, caused numerous delays and protests from the travelling public.

Serious consideration therefore began to be given at the beginning of the new century to the possibility of a full nationalisation of the railways, and in 1905 this was done with the creation of the Amministrazione Ferrovie dello Stato, State-owned Corporation.

THE FERROVIE DELLO STATO CORPORATION

'Ferrovie dello Stato' was incorporated by Act of Parliament (Law no. 137 of 1905) and inherited the difficult situation from which the three major networks it had acquired were suffering.

But nationalisation did help to meet the demands from different sections of society: the Chambers of Commerce, that who had so often complained about the high tariffs that were discouraging exports; the railway workers, who felt more secure both because of their working conditions and improved pay; and the Italian industrialists, who had greater possibilities for acquiring railway tenders now that the engineering industry was able to compete satisfactorily with the most highly developed European countries.

Riccardo Bianchi, the former director of the Rete Sicula (Sicilian Network) was appointed to organise, set in motion and develop the new Corporation. He embarked on a wide-ranging programme to reorganise the network, modernise the plant and rolling stock, and to upgrade the stations.

Service quality began to improve and there were fewer complaints, and all the economic indicators began to rise. The long period of economic expansion in Italy under Giolitti was also helped by the enhanced efficiency of rail transport, which drove the increased demand that continued uninterruptedly through to the outbreak of the first world war.

It was during this period that the tunnel under the Simplon was brought into service and the ferry service over the Strait of Messina, that had just recently been introduced, came into operation.

The beginning of electric traction

But by far the most outstanding event in this period was the large-scale electrification plan for the whole network which made Italy a European leader in this field.

Research began in 1899 into the electrification of the track and experiments were carried out with accumulators and third rails using direct current.

On the Valtellina line an experiment was carried out that immediately revealed its great potential. The line was electrified using three-phase alternating 3,000 V 15Hz current. This was the first time that such high voltages had ever been used, and in view of the success of the operation it was decided to use the same system for the electrification of the Giovi line, where the gradients were as steep as 1 in 28.

The line was electrified with 3,600 V 16.7Hz three-phase current, and an electric locomotive was designed - the FS E 550 - which delivered an excellent performance. For the new train was able to pull 700 wagons a day, compared with only 450 using steam locomotives, and the new train was nicknamed "the Giant of Giovi".

The First World War and the inter-war period

When Italy entered the Great War in 1915 the rail network proved its ability to perform the strategic tasks assigned to it, transporting all the troops and materiel to the Front and taking the wounded troops to hospitals well away from the battlefields, effectively and without interruption.

Between the two world wars, particular attention was devoted to the railways. To improve their efficiency, the Board of Directors was dismissed and replaced by administrators. During the Fascist period, wages were cut and railway workers dismissed. Of the 235,500 employees in 1921, 85,000 were sacked during the Twenties and by 1937 there were only 133,100 railway workers left.

But the great change occurred in 1924 with the institution of the Ministry of Communications. This was the age of large-scale electrification. The Rome-Naples express line was completed, and after 13 years of work on building the 18½ kilometre-long "Great Apennines Tunnel" the Florence-Bologna line was finally inaugurated.

With the electrification programme, moreover, the electrified network was increased from the 450 kilometres at the end of the First World War to 1,200 km in 1928, and by 1939 topped 5,170 kilometres. The electrification programme had concentrated mostly on the international links with France, Austria and Switzerland, but had ignored virtually the whole of southern Italy.

However, because of the focus on road-building, rail began to lose out against road transport. At the start of the Thirties, Italy had four times as many motorcars and twice as many lorries and trucks on the road than it had a decade earlier.

The war and reconstruction

Before Italy's entry into the war, in 1940 the State railway network was over 17,000 kilometres long, carrying 194 million passengers and some 60 million tonnes of freight a year. In the early years of the war these figures rose, as vehicle fuel became more scarce.

But during the war, it was the ports and railway lines that were the chief strategic targets. In 1945 more than 40% of track had been destroyed, and much of the rolling stock. Just to give some idea of the extent of the destruction, when the war ended Italy had only 1,803 locomotives left of the original 4,177, and only 1,255 of the 8,704 passenger coaches.

In the wake of the Second World War, the Railways were once again used to spearhead the huge reconstruction effort place, and by the end of 1945 the rail network had been restored almost to its 1940 level, but this massive undertaking never managed to bring any real improvement to the system itself.

The network remained virtually unchanged, while Italians were becoming more mobile, and it was now becoming more necessary to carry vast amounts of goods and commodities from one part of the country to the other in a period of all-out economic growth following the traumatic war years, and the railways were unable to meet this demand fully.

THE RUSH FOR PRIVATE MOTORING

Even as soon as the railway network had been reconstructed, it was already out of date, overtaken by the powerful government-driven policy to introduce and develop private motoring: new roads and motorways were built, increasingly relegating the railways to the sidelines.

It took the great oil crisis in 1974, and heightened public concern about the problems of environmental sustainability, to put the railways back to the fore in driving the country's economic development.

At the beginning of the Eighties, Italy had an unenviable record in the way that road transport had been allowed to seriously handicap the railways: 85% travelled by motorcar from one city to another, while only 12% took by train. The situation had not changed by the end of the decade: 85% of people and 80% of goods traffic still used road transport, and the railways were unable to cope with incremental traffic volumes generated in the meantime by increased industrial output.

Meanwhile, abroad - and particularly in France and Germany - the High Speed system was already a reality. Italian railways had only just begun to address the problem of upgrading the railway network, by quadrupling the main lines which carried the vast bulk of the national passenger and freight traffic.

For traffic capacity could only be increased by embarking on new track construction, to ease congestion on the existing lines which were by now saturated, transferring medium-haul and long-haul traffic to the new fast tracks while simultaneously upgrading local, commuter, and freight traffic using the old network.