Roma Capitale has officially approved five strategic decrees totaling nearly 29 milioni to fund critical infrastructure updates, replacing 48 escalators and 17 elevators on Metro A while executing a deep technological overhaul of the Metro C operating and safety systems.
Infrastructure decay in legacy transit networks is a ticking clock. When municipal authorities finally greenlight funding, the engineering reality often involves ripping out decades-old electromechanical hardware and replacing it with modern, resilient architectures. In Rome, that reality has hit both ends of the capital’s underground lines.
Tackle-Scale Upgrades for Metro A Vertical Transport
The lion’s share of the newly approved 29 milioni investment is directed toward a comprehensive technical-economic feasibility project. This initiative targets the wholesale replacement of 48 escalators and 17 elevators. Out of these, 44 escalators and 16 elevators are distributed across heavy-traffic stations: Battistini, Cornelia, Baldo degli Ubaldi, Valle Aurelia, and Cipro. An additional four escalators and one elevator slated for replacement service the Anagnina parking interchange hub.
For daily commuters navigating the Roman underground, these units represent perennial bottlenecks. Replacing them requires deep civil and electrical engineering integration to match modern load-bearing standards, energy efficiency profiles, and safety compliance matrices.
Shoring Up the Invisible Infrastructure of Metro C
While Metro A gets vertical relief, Metro C is undergoing a vital digital and electrical reinforcement. Four distinct administrative decrees account for roughly 11 milioni dedicated strictly to this line. The most pressing technical intervention is a roughly 4,5 milioni allocation targeting evolutionary maintenance for the line’s SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) framework.
SCADA architectures serve as the invisible nervous system of modern mass transit. They aggregate telemetry from field devices to a central operations room, translating raw data into actionable situational awareness. According to technical disclosures from the administration, multiple hardware and software components within the current Metro C SCADA deployment have been declared end-of-life (EOL) by their original manufacturers. They are no longer supported or commercially available on the open market, creating a severe operational vulnerability that demands immediate remediation.
Without continuous vendor support, critical industrial control systems face heightened risks of unpatched exploits, hardware failure, and cascading telemetry blackouts. The upcoming engineering cycle will modernize these components, securing the digital backbone that monitors tunnel safety, passenger throughput, station environments, and grid energy distribution in real time.
Decennial Power Systems Revision
Complementing the SCADA overhaul, an investment of nearly 4 milioni addresses the mandatory ten-year technical revision of Metro C’s heavy electrical infrastructure. This lifecycle maintenance project covers 45 low-voltage switchboards, 25 uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units, and 255 medium-voltage circuit breakers.
Executing these cyclical overhauls is non-negotiable under industrial technical regulations. Medium-voltage switchgear and low-voltage distribution panels degrade under continuous electrical load and environmental stress. Upgrading them ensures that traction power and auxiliary station grids maintain fault-tolerance, preventing catastrophic sub-station failures that could otherwise halt automated transit loops.
As these five executive measures transition from technical approval to active procurement and site execution, Roma Capitale’s transit engineering teams face a compressed timeline to modernize high-wear hardware without crippling daily urban mobility.
