1.75 million fine to RFI for the railway chaos of 2 October 2024

Almost 500 high-speed, intercity and regional trains cancelled, 70 thousand minutes of delay, chaos in the stations and slowdowns until the evening, thousands of tourists and commuters stuck on the platforms waiting for news. October 2, 2024 was a date to forget for rail transport: a fault in an electricity line during night-time work on the Rome railway hub had split Italy in two, creating enormous inconvenience for travellers. Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini reported that the technicians had spoken of an error by "a private company that planted a nail in a cable".

In July 2025, the Transport Authority had initiated sanctioning proceedings against RFI for that "very serious disruption of railway traffic": the verification ended with a fine of 1.75 million for the company responsible for the management, maintenance and development of the national railway infrastructure.

According to the authority led by Nicola Zaccheo, in fact, RFI "has not adopted suitable measures to guarantee the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure, ensuring its accessibility and functionality". The resolution explains that the maximum amount of the fine of 2 million euros has been reduced by 250 thousand euros, "in consideration of the conduct carried out following the violation".

For its part, RFI, heard by the Transport Authority, «the contested event can be classified exclusively as a failure of the infrastructure and, as such, was managed with a series of interventions that allowed the infrastructure to be gradually restored to full operation».

Therefore "it is not correct to qualify the manager's conduct as negligent, being more correct to qualify the event in the sense of a mere failure - caused by an unpredictable action - which was subsequently managed with interventions that allowed the gradual restoration of the infrastructure, even though this failure occurred in a strategic area of ​​the national infrastructure".