Bravo! Fantastic work. It’s remarkable what can be achieved when you have slow but steady progress for over 100 years.
I’d be interested to learn more about how incremental improvements like grade separations and track improvements get funded. Are these budgeted out of a general improvement fund, which is relatively consistent over time?
Reflecting on your comment contrasting against Anglo-sphere project planning, I suspect it’s better to have a smaller but long-running, predictable budget than “surprise” big-bang funding.
As I briefly mentioned in the last section, it was a multi-year plan devised by FS and funded via laws passed by the parliament between the late 1950s and 1991. Since 1991, the primary tool has been a multi-year framework agreement that foresees a general level of spending over the next 5 years. It details all the projects and programs it will spend on, with yearly revisions. Since 2008, the CdP (the framework agreement) has been divided into two main parts: one about SoGR/maintenance/existing assets improvements, which is more stable over time, and one about upgrades and new projects that are more sensible to political commitments and economic availability in the general budget. Importantly, RFI (the Infra management FS subsidiary) has a strong planning and design capacity internally and via Italferr (FS engineering arm) that allows them to come up with a lot of studies and projects that they inherited from the FS in-house planning and engineering department
This is an incredible essay - I love the extremely detailed classification of different types of projects, along with numerous examples. This must have been an enormous amount of work to put together. This is really valuable work, to document all this history in a form that may be more legible to English-speaking planners and policy-makers.
I've really appreciated your article. What may appear as a series of isolated projects is in fact part of +/- explicit continuities. It's important to give this historical perspective.
2 curiosities from me on the Italian railway, and therefore 2 suggestions for perhaps future articles ;):
- "passante ferroviario": typology, choice of networks, choice of infrastructure. I don't have the impression that there are lot of common points between the strategy and choices in Torino, Milano, Bologna, or Firenze, but maybe I'm wrong ?
- The choice to make the AV lines compatible with freight (slopes, axle load), even if to my knowledge there has never been any conventional freight traffic until now.
Bravo! Fantastic work. It’s remarkable what can be achieved when you have slow but steady progress for over 100 years.
I’d be interested to learn more about how incremental improvements like grade separations and track improvements get funded. Are these budgeted out of a general improvement fund, which is relatively consistent over time?
Reflecting on your comment contrasting against Anglo-sphere project planning, I suspect it’s better to have a smaller but long-running, predictable budget than “surprise” big-bang funding.
As I briefly mentioned in the last section, it was a multi-year plan devised by FS and funded via laws passed by the parliament between the late 1950s and 1991. Since 1991, the primary tool has been a multi-year framework agreement that foresees a general level of spending over the next 5 years. It details all the projects and programs it will spend on, with yearly revisions. Since 2008, the CdP (the framework agreement) has been divided into two main parts: one about SoGR/maintenance/existing assets improvements, which is more stable over time, and one about upgrades and new projects that are more sensible to political commitments and economic availability in the general budget. Importantly, RFI (the Infra management FS subsidiary) has a strong planning and design capacity internally and via Italferr (FS engineering arm) that allows them to come up with a lot of studies and projects that they inherited from the FS in-house planning and engineering department
This is an incredible essay - I love the extremely detailed classification of different types of projects, along with numerous examples. This must have been an enormous amount of work to put together. This is really valuable work, to document all this history in a form that may be more legible to English-speaking planners and policy-makers.
Thanks! Yes, it was quite the work, especially because the sources are disparate and not always easily available online.
Grazie mille :).
I've really appreciated your article. What may appear as a series of isolated projects is in fact part of +/- explicit continuities. It's important to give this historical perspective.
2 curiosities from me on the Italian railway, and therefore 2 suggestions for perhaps future articles ;):
- "passante ferroviario": typology, choice of networks, choice of infrastructure. I don't have the impression that there are lot of common points between the strategy and choices in Torino, Milano, Bologna, or Firenze, but maybe I'm wrong ?
- The choice to make the AV lines compatible with freight (slopes, axle load), even if to my knowledge there has never been any conventional freight traffic until now.