Viral rubbish about railway, this time about trains in Italy

This popped up in my Facebook feed just now:

It links here. The graphic has 2.5k reactions, 375 comments, and 468 shares.

The problem? Yeah, it’s pretty much ALL wrong.

Mi O My Italy who posted it posted the right km/h to mph conversion in their text above the pic, but were too lazy to change the pic.

But that’s not actually the main problem. All the rest is wrong or misleading!

Italo deploys AGV trains – and these have a design speed of 360km/h (see Wikipedia), but there are no lines in Italy rated at above 300km/h and the approved speed for Italo’s AGV trains is 300km/h. And these trains do not run outside Italy. I have no idea if Italo has ever attempted some kind of high speed record with one of its trains – nothing with a AGV is listed here.

Oh and as if that isn’t enough, the Italo train shown in the picture is not a AGV but the slower ETR 675 – maximum speed 250km/h.

So what about Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa on the right?

Here too the 300km/h limit in everyday service applies. 393.8km/h was a speed record attempt in 2016 by Trenitalia (see the table here), but – you guessed it – not with the type of train shown. The record was with a Frecciarossa 1000, not the ETR 500 shown. The fastest a ETR 500 has ever gone is 362km/h, further down the table here.

Trenitalia trains do run outside Italy – in both France and Spain. No line in Spain is listed with a operating speed above 300km/h according to openrailwaymap (even if the design speed on some lines is higher). France does have some 320km/h lines in operation, but Trenitalia trains do not run on any of those lines. So 300km/h it is there as well.

So here’s the graphic – corrected. My picture, taken in the summer of 2022 (and sorry about the shadow on the AGV). But at least it is correct!

But sure, keep on sharing the wrong version folks!

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