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The European automotive market is on firehigh speed railway. The French Tgv from Sncf (Société nationale des chemins de fer français) will challenge the Italian Frecciarossa 1000. And it will do so directly on its home tracks, that is, in Italy, starting from 2026 after the same Frecciarossa of Trenitalia (FS) entered the transalpine market along the route some time ago Paris-Lyon. All this while the French state railways, Sncf, are preparing for the first time in their history to face, on the internal market, an independent private railway company in high-speed trains: Proxima. But let’s go in order.
The French TGV arrives in Italy
The railway company Sncf Voyageurs (Trenitalia d’Oltralpe) has announced its intention to establish itself in Italy starting from 2026 with the opening of several national high-speed routes and plans to reach a market share of 15% by 2030. An official request to this effect, according to the newspaper Le Monde, has already been presented to RFI, the manager of the national railway infrastructure. The framework agreement proposed to the Italian authorities covers a period of 15 years.
The transalpine railway company will offer nine daily return trips between Turin, Milan, Rome and Naples and four return trips between Turin and Venicewhich will be carried out with 15 of the new TGV M high-speed trains, the first deliveries of which are scheduled for the second half of 2025. The manufacturer of the TGV is Alstom (French), the competitor of Hitachi Rail (Japanese), which in its once manufactured the Frecciarossa 1000. Alstom is also the manufacturer of the trains Italian. So, on Italian tracks it will also be a challenge technological and engineering between large train manufacturers and not just between railway companies.
Sncf’s offer will be introduced “gradually”, the company communicates, as has happened in Spain (where Sncf started operations in 2021 and is expected to complete the entire offer by the end of this year). In addition to the main cities, the French company will serve Brescia, Verona, Padua, Bologna and Florence. With the landing of the French, the operators in the Italian high-speed railway will increase to three: Fs, Italo and Sncf.
The daily service between Paris, Turin and Milan will also continue, which is currently reduced to just one return journey per day (instead of three), part of which is carried out by bus after the landslide in the Maurienne valley interrupted the rail connection last August. The reopening of the Frejus railway tunnel, between France and Italy, is not expected before November.
