A major disruption at Rome’s Termini Station on Wednesday led to widespread delays across Italy’s high-speed rail network. The blockage, which affected approximately 180 trains, was traced back to a combination of human error and technical failures within the station’s electrical system. The incident was triggered when a maintenance worker from an external company, contracted by RFI (the state railway infrastructure manager), mistakenly drove a nail into a conduit carrying essential electrical cables, a fact later confirmed by RFI.
While the misplaced nail was the immediate cause, it was not the sole reason for the disruption. A series of electrical malfunctions, including a failure in the backup safety systems designed to ensure power continuity during outages, contributed significantly to the breakdown. These systems, which should have provided temporary power, failed to activate fully, leaving the station’s control room powerless for hours.
The maintenance work began late Tuesday night as part of a routine operation, expected to be low-risk and simple. However, between 2 and 3 AM, a critical error occurred when a nail was driven into a plastic conduit that housed cables supplying power to the station’s control room. This control room manages the real-time operation of the rail network, overseeing train movements, signals, and track switches. With its power cut, all train services were effectively halted, and no emergency warnings were triggered, exacerbating the situation.
Compounding the problem, the station’s Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system, which took over after the power cut, ran out of battery by 6:20 AM without alerting technicians. As a result, technicians had to manually restore power using backup generators. This process took about two hours, but by the time trains resumed at 8:30 AM, significant delays and cancellations had already rippled through the network, impacting stations in cities like Florence, Milan, Naples, and Turin.
The fallout from this incident has led to the suspension of the maintenance company’s contract, with RFI launching an internal investigation to determine further accountability. The disruption is the latest in a series of recent failures that have plagued Italy’s rail network, raising concerns about the system’s capacity to handle increasing traffic without modernization. Additionally, growing discontent among maintenance workers over new labor agreements has further strained an already overburdened infrastructure.
