Italo : New high-speed trains in Italy

Italy — Europe’s first private operator of high-speed, domestic trains started running over the weekend, seeking to compete against state-run service.

• Europe's first private operator of high-speed trains, Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV.L)
• three different classes of travel
• A fleet of 25 trains will link Turin in the north with Salerno in southern Italy, via Milan, Rome and Naples, as well as Venice with Rome, at a speed of 300 kilometres per hour -- the maximum allowed speed on the Italian rail network.

It took over 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 miles per hour on 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 high-speed domestic 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 and boarded sleek, modern trains with blue leather seats and white interiors.

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.

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 eight million to nine million passengers a year, which would allow the company to break even.

The battleground will be over high-end services, pricing and food.

 The Italo trains provide their 450 passengers with free Wi-Fi, satellite television, a 39-seat cinema carriage, leather seats manufactured by the luxury furniture maker Poltrona Frau, and assistance and welcome points in the main stations designed by the team of the Italian architect Stefano Boeri. A third of all tickets will be available at a lower cost, if booked early and for off-peak times.

The trains do not rely on locomotive cars but have engines underneath each of the 11 carriages that are intended to increase capacity and safety.

As of 2009, Italians took high-speed trains considerably less than French or German rail passengers, as only 22 percent of passengers used them in Italy, compared with nearly 27 percent in Germany and 60 percent in France. However, since then, high-speed trains started darting between Rome and Milan in only three hours, and Trenitalia’s market share increased to 55 percent from 32 percent on this route, while airline travel decreased to 32 percent from 52 percent. 

For Alstom, Italo will be a chance to showcase its next-generation bullet trains after being snubbed by Channel Tunnel train operator Eurostar, which last year opted to replace its fleet with trains made by German arch-rival Siemens