Rome Is Ready To Carry Millennium Pilgrims

International Railway Journal, Dec, 1999 by David Briginshaw

Rome has invested heavily to improve transport facilities to prepare the city for the extra 12 million people who are expected to visit the Italian capital and the Vatican to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago.The Jubilee celebrations organised by the Vatican are due to start on Christmas Eve (December 24) and will continue throughout next year until January 6 2001.

A Jubilee fund was set up by the government to finance a number of projects to enable Rome to cope with such a huge increase in visitors during 2000. A special organisation was created to ensure that projects were completed by the end of this year. Only projects which could be com plaeted by this month were eligible for Jubilee funds, and any project which failed to meet the deadline would have its funding withdrawn. This strict control was vital in a country like Italy where projects are rarely completed on time if at all. In addition, all major infrastructure works in Rome will be halted (apart from emergency works) during 2000 to prevent any disruption to traffic flows.

ROME is a popular destination for tourists-it had 14.1 million visitors in 1997. But next year's Jubilee celebrations to mark 2000 years of Christianity will boost these numbers by 85% to 26.1 million. However, the main influx will start in April because of Easter, when nearly 3 million visitors are expected, and it will peak in May with a total of 4.25 million visitors. The most critical time will be the weekend of August 19-20 when the Pope will greet between 1.5 million and 2 million young people from around the world.

One major casualty was the planned new metro Line C which would have linked the Vatican with the historic heart of Rome including the Colosseum. "We had hoped to build the central section of Line C," said Dott-Ing Giorgio Coletti, who is responsible for new studies and strategic planning in the engineering department of Cotral, which runs the metro. "At first, the project looked possible, but funding for the Jubilee legislation only arrived in mid-1997 and the amount of archaeological remains discovered was greater than expected." The tunnels will not disturb the archaeological remains because they will be 27m deep, but the access shafts to the station platforms will obviously have to pass through them.

Cotral hopes to start construction of the underground part of Line C from Ottaviano southeast towards Pantano in 2001. It should take about five years to complete at a total cost of about Lire 200 billion/km.

Line C will take over the 8km eastern end of the 850mm-gauge Pantano line. This section is currently being upgraded to prepare it for metro operation. Dual-gauge sleepers are being installed and it will be operated like a Brussels pre-metro line until its final conversion to a metro-the rest of the line will then probably become a light rail line. Eventually Line C will be 29km long, making it the longest metro line in Rome. It is also hoped to start work in 2001 on a 3.8km branch from Piazza Bologna on Line B to Conco D'oro.

A number of projects designed to extend and improve Line A are nearing completion. A two-station extension west from Ottaviano to Valle Aurelia opened in May, and the final part of the 4.5km extension to Battistini will open this month.

A batch of 10 trains is being supplied, five from AnsaldoBreda and five from Fiat Ferroviaria. The new trains have more capacity than Line A's existing trains because they have six cars instead of five. They also have wide inter-car gangways within each three-car unit to improve passenger distribution and security, and electric rather than pneumatic door control.

These will be the last trains to be ordered in conjunction with new line construction, as Cotral plans to invite international tenders soon for a rolling programme to supply several hundred new trains over a number of years. "We need more new trains for Line A and for the extension to Line B, plus a fleet of trains for Line C," Coletti explained to IRJ in Rome. The winner of the contract will also have to maintain the trains.

Line A must rank as one of the most unattractive metro lines in Europe. The stations are badly lit and dreary in the extreme, in stark contrast with the new extension and Line B, both of which are finished to a good standard. However, work has started to upgrade Line A in stages. The first phase covered the southeastern section of the line. It consisted of upgrading five stations (including the provision of facilities for disabled passengers) and modernising the ventilation system to improve passenger comfort and to meet current Italian fire-safety standards for metro lines. The latter entailed building new ventilation shafts.

Termini is the busiest station on the metro, being the interchange between lines A and B and with Italian State Railways' (FS) mainline services. Extensive refurbishment of the mainline station is nearing completion. This includes a new underground commercial centre, and new catering facilities overlooking the refurbished ticket hall. Unfortunately, only the first stage of Cotral's project to upgrade the metro interchange will be ready for the Jubliee. This Involves complicated behind-the-scenes work to relocate pipes and cables in preparation for the main construction, which will now take place in 2001, to build new links between the two metro lines and new exits from the metro station.