ITALY’s national agency for rail and road safety, Ansfisa, has granted the Authorisation to Place on the Market (Apom) for the ETR 108 EMU built by Alstom for Trenitalia, enabling the new fleet to enter service on the national network.
The Apom, issued on May 25, covers both the regional and inter-city variants of the ETR 108, developed from Alstom's Coradia Stream platform and Trenitalia's Pop fleet, modified to operate at up to 200km/h compared with the 160km/h maximum speed of ETR 104 EMUs.
The eight-car, 160m-long 3kV dc ETR 108 EMUs can accommodate up to 1076 passengers, 618 of them seated, and are equipped with ETCS.
An initial batch of 12 regional trains has been ordered by the Umbria region for operation on the Rome - Florence high-speed line, where the new trains will run at their maximum speed between Orte and Settebagni. A separate order for 12 inter-city-trains has been funded under Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). This was conditional on the new trains receiving approval by June, a deadline that was only just met.
To obtain approval for operating at higher speed on 3kV dc lines, a new pantograph design, the JRC200 single-arm type, was developed jointly by Politecnico di Milano and Trenitalia, using an ETR 460 Pendolino for test runs in early 2024.
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