A tombstone (or almost) on the hopes of seeing high-speed rail in Calabria in the near future. It comes from the EU Commission which last Wednesday presented the railway network to be built by 2040. The EU TAV will therefore be built with a mix of new lines and existing but updated sections, so as to connect the capitals and main cities of the continent – from East to West, from North to South -, without neglecting the candidate countries to join the club. It’s a shame, however, that in the maps released by Brussels’ institutional channels there is no trace of the South.
The high-speed network that goes from Rome and Milan towards the North and West does not seem to include Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia (only Bari will be connected in 2040) and Sicily. An ambitious plan that risks definitively marginalizing the South. Estimates indicate that completing the planned high-speed Ten-T network by 2040 will cost around 345 billion, while a more ambitious network operating at very high speeds (well over 250 km/h) could cost up to 546 billion by 2050 (but the return would be 750 billion).
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