A scorching summer looms on Italy’s railways, particularly for freight trains. RFI’s 1,200 active worksites, mostly driven by funding and deadlines tied to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), are not just causing delays and disruption—they also involve long-term line closures. The most striking case is the Milan-Genoa line, where €55 million in construction work is focused on the Po River bridge between Cava Manara and Bressana Bottarone.
The works will temporarily reduce the line’s capacity to a single track in two phases, from 1 June to 20 July and again from 30 August to 28 September 2025. More significantly, a full closure and complete suspension of rail traffic between Pavia and Voghera is scheduled from 21 July to 29 August. During this period, only passenger services will be maintained—albeit with highly uncompetitive travel times, as long-distance trains will be diverted via Piacenza and, in part, Mortara. For freight, only connections towards Alessandria or Piacenza will be maintained, while all services directed towards the Milan hub will effectively be halted.
Another critical bottleneck is the Sempione corridor between Domodossola and Milan, where RFI will once again carry out major upgrades during summer 2025, leading to another complete closure of the line—just as occurred in summer 2024. These works are primarily aimed at enlarging tunnel profiles to meet the “four-metre corridor” standard, a requirement in Switzerland for unrestricted intermodal traffic. At certain times, partial closures will also allow for extraordinary maintenance works, such as track renewals.
As a result, the Arona-Premosello section will be closed from 8 June to 27 July and again from 30 August to 13 September 2025. And the outlook is far from reassuring: the works are expected to continue for several years, with reduced service on the Sempione axis each summer at least until 2027. These prolonged disruptions were a key factor in DB Cargo Italia’s 2024 decision to reconsider its operations at the Domodossola terminal.
The Milan-Genoa and Sempione lines are not the only railways affected by long or short-term closures in 2025. Many other routes—such as the main line in the Aosta Valley, the Valtellina corridor, the Pistoia-Lucca or the Empoli-Siena lines—mainly impact passenger services. But there is another line where freight traffic is being hit, despite being predominantly used by passenger trains: the Codogno-Cremona-Mantua corridor, currently undergoing full duplication works, which require total line closures wherever construction is underway.
This has led to the suspension of services between Bozzolo and Mantua from January 2024 through to December 2026—three full years. This is the first stretch of the doubling works between Piadena and the provincial capital. The closed section spans 25.8 kilometres of the 34-kilometre route from Piadena to Mantua. And it doesn’t end there: the works, scheduled in multiple phases, are set to continue for nearly a decade. Alongside Bozzolo-Mantua, other segments—such as Codogno-Cavatigozzi—will also face full closures, with the latter expected to last over four years.
This decision is having a significant impact on freight traffic, which is being forced onto alternative routes that are often longer and more costly. For instance, the Cremona freight terminal at Cavatigozzi is now cut off from its usual routes, which had previously allowed it to avoid busier lines on RFI’s core network. The importance of Cavatigozzi is underscored by the fact that the short section between this terminal and Cremona is the only part of the Codogno-Mantua corridor that has already been doubled. Around twenty freight trains a day used to travel the Cremona-Mantua line, originating from the Brenner Pass, Trieste, and Porto Marghera. Now, in order to reach Cavatigozzi, these trains would have to take detours of about three additional hours, with further limitations due to axle load restrictions on some of the alternative lines. The result is that everything shifts to the roads.
Piermario Curti Sacchi
