Italy’s €12.7 Billion Railway Project Uses Digital Technology to Transform Sicily

• Proeksa Meas
• 31 August 2026
• Construction Focus
• 581 Views

Italy is carrying out a major €12.7 billion railway modernization project designed to transform transportation across Sicily by improving connections between Palermo, Catania, and Messina.

Led by Italferr, the New Palermo–Catania–Messina Railway Connection aims to reduce travel times, increase rail reliability and service frequency, and improve both passenger and freight transportation. Once completed, the journey between Palermo and Catania is expected to fall from about three hours to two hours, while travel between Messina and Catania could drop from 75 minutes to 45 minutes.

The project is also expected to create around 8,000 jobs and involve more than 600 companies. By improving rail mobility, the infrastructure program aims to reduce road congestion, air and noise pollution, and energy consumption.

Digital technology is playing a key role in managing the project’s complexity. Italferr uses Bentley Systems’ ProjectWise as a central platform for sharing and managing project data. The system has helped the team coordinate more than 9,800 information models across over 20 disciplines and more than 400 users.

ProjectWise has reduced the time needed to update federated models by 80% and cut contractor data-transfer times by 50%. The digital workflow has also helped the project team identify and resolve more than 4,500 design conflicts before construction.

Other Bentley technologies, including OpenRail, OpenRoads, MicroStation, SYNCHRO 4D Pro, and Bentley LumenRT, are being used for railway design, road infrastructure, construction scheduling, model coordination, and 3D visualization.

The project demonstrates how digital engineering and collaborative data management can help deliver large-scale infrastructure more efficiently while supporting quality, regulatory compliance, and sustainable transportation.

• Bentley
• ProjectWise
• MicroStation
• Bentley Systems
• Synchro
• OpenRoads
• LumenRT
• OpenRail