The Alpine Rail Motorway is set to be revived after a prolonged interruption, initially caused by a landslide that halted all train traffic through the Fréjus tunnel and later prolonged by a lack of funding from the Italian and French governments. The announcement came on 18 June 2025 from the Turin-Lyon Intergovernmental Conference, whose president Paolo Foietta declared that a funding agreement had been reached and that it would be formally communicated to the European Union in the coming days. However, a full resumption of the rail service between Orbassano’s inland terminal and the French terminal in Aiton is expected only between the end of summer and the beginning of autumn 2025.
This outcome would mark a positive conclusion to a story that, until recently, seemed to spell the end of a service launched experimentally in 2003 and made permanent the following year. Since then, the Alpine Rail Motorway has carried more than 500,000 semi-trailers across the Alps, shifting over 1.667 billion tonnes of freight from road to rail. Its peak year was 2021, when approximately 50,000 loading units were transported. But on 27 August 2023, a major landslide struck the French side of the railway, forcing a complete halt to all train traffic.
The line between Turin and Lyon reopened to traffic nineteen months later, on 31 March 2025, but without the Alpine Rail Motorway trains. Then, on 21 April, the operating company—jointly owned by Mercitalia Rail and Viia (SNCF)—notified suppliers and clients that operations would cease, stating that “the service has been terminated with no prospects of resumption at present”. The reason cited was the interruption of funding from the Italian and French states. Negotiations resumed in the meantime, leading up to the announcement of 18 June.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Italy and France will each provide €2.5 million to restart the service, an amount expected to sustain operations for about one year. One final step remains: approval of the funding by the European Commission. Brussels, however, requires that public subsidies not be granted solely to the Alpine Rail Motorway but must also be extended to other railway operators. The relaunch of the service will nonetheless face several operational challenges. First, the company will need to rebuild its customer base, as many firms have found alternatives during the two-year suspension. Secondly, the new competitive framework will demand organisational and pricing adjustments in order to attract private operators.
