The work and the technique: Turin - Milan high-speed railway, Italy

Work on the Turin-Milan high-speed, high-capacity railway line was divided into two sections: the Turin-Novara and the Novara-Milan.

The extremely tight implementation time frame, of less than 94 months, involved an extraordinary effort both in terms of the technical and organizational aspects and in terms of labour management, with over 6,000 workers. 

The base was the first element to be built, constructing a final layer of asphalt with a thickness of 12 centimetres as the finishing element of the railway seat. Then the foundation blocks were placed, and the piling supporting the contact line for electric traction was also laid.

Next, two-compartment concrete conduits were prepared on both sides of the rail-road bed, which are necessary to contain the cables for operating the line, including the very important fibre-optic cable that provides information to trains passing over the line. The information originates from the Settimo Torinese station, and is radiated via radio antennas placed every 5 km, meeting the requirements of European safety regulations called ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System).

Once the base was made, the process of rail-road rigging was carried out through two mobile construction sites started from the ends of the line, both capable of laying 1,200 meters of track per day using two different methods. The first, which allows both tracks to be built at the same time, involves the laying of a temporary service track on which the machinery and worksite trains move for the construction of the actual track: the sestine, or six flat wagons joined together, carried 3,900 meters of rails; from another wagon the prestressed reinforced concrete sleepers were taken and laid on the crushed stone surface with a 60-cm pitch. Then, with the use of a laying machine, the rails welded together with a spark welder were precisely positioned and secured with an elastic clip to the crossbeams with a gouging machine. With hopper trains, an additional layer of crushed stone was laid to settle the entire sleeper-rail system.

The second method, which allows building one track at a time, was used for the section with the junction to the old railway line. In this case, a laying train was adopted, along with other wagons for transporting materials, and a special machine on wheeled tracks capable of picking up and placing, with a sophisticated GPS coordinate topographical system, up to 120 sleepers at a time, and rails of corresponding lengths, so as to create a true mechanized assembly line. 

Once the entire line was built, the technological equipping activities of facilities to enable the movement of trains began, forming the electric contact line for train movement, by attaching to the poles, the structures, called brackets, that support the catenary, which consists of a carrying rope and the contact wire on which the train pantograph slides.

After appropriate testing, works on the first Turin-Novara section were completed in 2006, and work on the Novara-Milan section was completed in 2009 to complete the entire line.

In carrying out the work, significant environmental upgrading was carried out in the area crossed by the railway line. More than 20 polluted sites have been cleaned up, and about 30 areas of abandoned waste have been restored to their original condition. In addition, a specific post-operam monitoring plan for polluted sites has been implemented.