Long term planning of cross-border services between Italy and Switzerland

In 2012 Switzerland and Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the goal of improving cross-border passenger services, ensuring greater punctuality and quality of international train services.

Following the good transnational cooperation the Memorandum of Understanding was renewed for the 2035 horizon. Under this agreement Trenolab was tasked to generate possible future scenarios for international long-distance traffic, regional traffic and freight traffic, but also to identify potential infrastructure improvements needed to implement the proposed long term transport services.

The main goals of the future transport services are:

• for the Zurich-Milan Corridor to run six pairs of freight trains per hour in the Gotthard tunnel and two international trains every hour between Ticino and Milan. For the Eurocity trains the aim is to connect Zurich and Milan below three hours;
• for the Cadenazzo-Luino corridor the goal is to schedule one pair of regional trains and two pairs of freight trains every hour;
• for the Brig-Domodossola corridor the goal is to schedule four pairs of freight trains per hour in the Simplon tunnel, one regional train and one Eurocity every hour for both directions.