23/03/2018
In early March, Akiem signed a 10-year full-service leasing contract for 10 TRAXX MS3 locomotives with Italian operator ISC. Here’s the story behind this exciting contract.
ISC (Interporto Servizi Cargo) is the main rail freight operator in the Campania region in southern Italy. The project: to operate semi-trailer trains on the Milan–Rome line. At the moment, this type of operation is impossible due to the incompatibility between the height of semi-trailers and that of tunnels. To get round this technical difficulty, ISC’s idea was to use the Bologna–Florence high-speed line during the night. To do so, ISC succeeded in meeting two critical requirements:
- obtain authorisation from the RFI, the Italian infrastructure manager, for night-time use of the high-speed line (a 10-year agreement was obtained in April 2017);
- have at its disposal multisystem locomotives (3 kv DC and 25 kv AC) with dynamic transition between SCMT and ETCS train protection systems; the locos would be needed at project start-up in 2019.
The 10 locomotives provided for in the contract – with an option for six more – will be developed on Bombardier’s latest MS3 platform and will be delivered between July 2019 and December 2020.
