Europe’s private high-speed trains off to a fast start
FLORENCE, Italy — It took more than five years, a roughly $1.3 billion investment and a neck-and-neck race with Italy’s national rail lines to get Europe’s first private operator of high-speed, domestic trains on track.
But the locomotives — dubbed Italo — finally started speeding around 186 mph Saturday, opening a new chapter in European rail travel and seeking to compete against state-run service with an emphasis on style and luxury.
The train company, Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori, is the first to compete with the state-run Trenitalia on highspeed service. As passengers boarded in Rome on its first run to Milan from Naples, they were met by smiling hostesses and stewards in dark red livery.
The company’s president is Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the chairman of Ferrari. Other developers include the luxury fashion businessman Diego Della Valle, the French railway company, Italy’s largest retail bank and the country’s largest insurer.
“We have brought an end to one of the longest monopolies in the history of our country,” di Montezemolo said during a press trip to Naples from Rome this month. “Finally, Italian travelers and tourists can choose.”
By the end of the year, the company plans to have 25 trains connecting nine Italian cities, and its goal is a 20 to 25 percent market share by 2014, with 8 million to 9 million passengers a year, which would allow the company to break even.
The Italo trains provide their 450 passengers with free Wi-fi, satellite television, a 39-seat cinema carriage, leather seats made by the luxury furniture maker Poltrona Frau, and assistance and welcome points in the main stations designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri.
“The risk NTV is taking is certainly very high, amplified by Italy’s current economic crisis and the improvement of the Italian infrastructure that is still lagging behind,” said Oliviero Baccelli, vice director at the Center for Research on Regional Economics, Transport and Tourism at the Milan-based Bocconi University. “But high-speed in Italy has very, very significant development margins.”
Trenitalia has also sought to compete in the high-end market, recently revamping some of its high-speed trains with leather interiors, a business carriage and first-class dining menus by the Umbrian chef Gianfranco Vissani.